We kidnapped a couple of college-bound cousins and sallied down to Soho last night for a great double bill of Stillwater, Oklahoma’s Other Lives and The Rosebuds, all as presented by Club Mercy.

First up was Other Lives, which consists of  leader Jesse Tabish (above) on guitar and keys, Jenny Hsu on cello and keyboards, Jonathon Mooney on piano,violin, guitar and harmonium, Josh Onstott on bass, organ and trumpet, and Colby Owens on drums.  Their music and songs at times reside in the brooding chamber-pop realm, but they can also make a more raucous, rockish sound driven by Owens powerful drumming and the others’ ensemble playing.  Most of the members contribute stunning harmony vocals to Tabish’s lead, the latter reminding of Interpol vocals at times (check out Tamer Animals in the video below).  Hsu greatly adds to the mix with occasional lead vocals, sweet harmonies and incisive cello and piano playing.  Taken as a whole, the band crafts complex songs of the heart and enlivens them with great ensemble performances.

Check out live performances of a couple of their gravitas-filled songs, For 12 and Tamer Animals, from their recent album “Tamer Animals.” And below those is the band performing Paper Cities on HearYa.

The Rosebuds followed, and we were pleasantly surprised to find that this was not just another twee husband-and-wife/boyfriend-and-girlfriend keyboard/guitar-based duo.  Instead the Rosebuds are an intermittently rocking four-piece featuring the valiant vocals and lively delivery of ex-marrieds Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp, with strong support on drums and violin.

Varying between uptempo, danceable numbers and broken-hearted ballads, the Rosebuds gave the disappointingly smallish audience a compelling set of sounds. Seizing on the sizing, Crisp even left her keyboard to come out onto the floor to motion the audience closer to the stage to create a more intimate setting.  As heard at Soho, the band’s gestalt is captured well by the title of their most recent album, Loud Planes Fly Low (a powerful album filled with odes to Crisp’s and Howard’s relationship–and the end thereof).  They were laudingly loud at times (especially when Other Lives’ Tabish joined them on one raucous song), but they glided well and low at other times.  We highly recommend you check out their new album.  The band should win over ample additional fans when it opens for Bon Iver on their national tour this summer.

You can check them out live below.

The Rosebuds – Loud Planes Fly Low from 521studies on Vimeo.

Photos by Lefort

My Morning Jacket came to the Santa Barbara Bowl Saturday and buttoned up the widely held belief that they are amongst the best live bands on the planet.  Despite having been on the road incessantly since mid-May in support of their new album, “Circuital,” the Jacket boys dug deep and threw off the ties that hinder and tether, and together with the audience, floated up into the sonic stratosphere.

Early on in the set, we briefly sensed the band’s exhaustion (understandable given their set the day before at the High Sierra Music Festival in the hinterlands northwest of Tahoe, and long travel after to Santa Barbara).  But they hid their fatigue well and galvanized behind hirsute guises and gazes, all the while gathering energy from the frenzied crowd and hallowed Bowl grounds.

As it has throughout its tour, the band opened with Victory Tour (Circuital’s opener) followed by Circuital.  The show began to take off with the  triumvirate of Off the Record, Anytime and Gideon.  The dynamic duo of At Dawn and Golden further levitated the crowd.  And then I’m Amazed floored.  For the hardcore connoisseurs, they then gave us the semi-obscure, reggae-influenced Phone Went West.  Next up was Dondante, the brilliant, elegiac ode to a former band member who left this earth too soon.  Introducing the song (perhaps in a nod to his passed friend), James said that the International Space Station would be flying over our direct location between 8:57 and 9:01.  He was narrowly off when the Station evidently (we missed it) became visible above the Bowl at 9:02.  Check the song and Station out below, courtesy of Sonic Ambulance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uMp1iYGTkU&feature=player_embedded

Throughout the night Jim James amazed with his ghost-siren vocals and percussive, driving guitar playing.  At times he seemed to sing with and to the revenants and spirits of the next world, just to let us in on a glorious vision and the sweetness of his longing.  And yet James tapped into the temporal too.  He stamped, rocked and repeatedly challenged drummer Patrick Hallahan, multi-instrumentalist Carl Broemel, and bassist Two-Tone Tommy to lift their games.  And each time they did, at times seeming to speak in musical tongues.  They left no question that in their musical revival tent, the spirits of Marvin Gaye, Joe Strummer, Neil Young (though he thankfully lives and plays on) and Bob Marley are well-channeled.

Hallahan deserves special mention as he is simply one of the best rock drummers in the business, playing with relentless drive and aplomb, all the while with his hair flailing and mouth agape (mirrored repeatedly by the slack-jawed audience that surrounded us).  And Broemel’s guitar, pedal steel and sax playing provide the perfect complement to the band and music.  We were initially unimpressed by Two-Tone Tommy, but it wasn’t long before he came to life, threw off his three-piece suit jacket, and began to dexterously slaughter the bottom line.  Bo Coster also added some nice touches on keys and percussion.

After Dondante, the band killed new crowd-favorite Holdin’ on to Black Metal.  The band was in full drive and the crowd responded by screaming the choruses, providing the best singalong we’ve heard since Arcade Fire’s Wake Up.   The one-two of Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt. 2 and crowd-favorite Mahgeeta euphorically ended the main set.

The audience’s hearty, Bowl-shaking effort to bring the band back was rewarded with an energetic encore consisting of Wordless Chorus, Highly Suspicious, and One Big Holiday. When James came back onstage he had a cape on, a la James Brown, which he eventually threw off and raced across the stage in abandon, ending in a drop-knee slide across the stage.  Manchester United’s Wayne Rooney couldn’t have done it any better, and the crowd went wild.  You can check Wordless Chorus below.

On Highly Suspicious, James one-upped Prince on vocals and the band raved on.  And then MMJ throttled up further with the anthemic One Big Holiday, tapping their last energy reserves and playing up to the very last second of the Bowl’s buzz-kill curfew (additional songs The Day Is Coming and I Will Sing You were on the band’s setlist but went un-played courtesy of the curfew).

A couple of minor “constructive complaints” about the show.  First: MMJ, please don’t go Milli Vanilli on us and drop in canned background vocal tracks.  Either bring Becky Stark and the Watson Twins (as seen recently on Conan, which you can check out HERE) or leave the canned vocals out.  They do a disservice to an otherwise perfect performance.  Second: the sound on the floor in GA was not optimum, with James vocals and Broemel’s instrumentals frequently getting lost in the mix.  While the sound at the sound board is  undoubtedly perfect, the sound on the floor seems to be lacking frequently in the reconfigured Bowl (all of which would seem to be easily remedied by adding some speakers at floor-level).

And finally, Central Coast, a word if we may:  We suggest that the next time My Morning Jacket comes to Santa Barbara you stay focused and do whatever you have to do to catch one of the best live bands on the earth.  Don’t let seats go unfilled like on Saturday.  It was another in a series of embarrassing moments recently for musical Santa Barbara.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOXgGzDYmhU&feature=player_embedded#at=174

Setlist

1. Victory Dance
2. Circuital
3. First Light
4. Off The Record
5. Anytime
6. Gideon
7. You Wanna Freak Out
8. At Dawn
9. Golden
10. Outta My System
11. The Way That He Sings
12. I’m Amazed
13. Dancefloors
14. Phone Went West
15. Slow Slow Tune
16. Dondante
17. Holdin On To Black Metal
18. Smokin From Shootin
19. Touch Me I’m Going To Scream Pt.2
20. Mahgeetah
———-
21. Wordless Chorus
22. Highly Suspicious
23. One Big Holiday

We are generally dismissive of “Official Videos” put out by bands, preferring to spend our time tracking down and waiting to be surprised by the more organic live performances where some time has elapsed to enable the artists to ruminate on and add dynamics to the sound beyond the recorded version.  Nonetheless, because of some cool videographical bits, we give you the Official Video for Bon Iver’s  Calgary from what is quickly ascending our “Best Albums of 2011 So Far” list.  Check it out.  Musically though, we’re saying it’s hard to beat the version done live on Colbert last week.

Here’s a sweet song by Seattlite, Bryan John Appleby, fittingly and creatively captured in this video by Christian Sorensen Hansen.  Thanks to our Ballard-eer friends for passing along.  Cool scene in Lake Washington near the Arboretum.

Cliffs Along The Sea from Christian Sorensen Hansen on Vimeo.

We were prepared to be disappointed, but Peter and the boys acquitted themselves nicely on Leno last week.  It might take seeing them live to sufficiently enliven the songs on their new “Burst Apart” album and help us move beyond the hallowed heights they achieved on their prior album, “Hospice.”  Check out the band’s performance of Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out below.  The boy can indeed sing, and the song finds a groove.

Last night on Conan, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings performed The Way it Goes off their new album, “The Harrow and the Harvest.”  You can stream the entire album over at NPR.  Check out the duo’s soulmate harmonies and Rawlings’ flawless guitar throughout.

Amor de Dias (consisting of Alasdair MacLean, front man for The Clientele, and Lupe Núñez-Fernández of indie-pop duo Pipas) has just released its music video for its song, Wild Winter Trees, in support of their first album, “Street of the Love of Days” on Merge Records.  In just 1:37 the video vividly conveys the song’s lyrics, with soft-focus on the family and familiar footing. And brothers and sisters.  And time passing.

Amor de Dí­as – Wild Winter Trees from Merge Records on Vimeo.

When most think of the songs of T.Rex, they think of Bang a Gong (Get it On), Jeepster and many others.  But for us, ever since it was released in 1973 on their stupendous album, “Tanx,” we always think first of Marc Bolan’s big-hearted ballad, Broken Hearted Blues.  And then we hit repeat (in part because the song is too short).   We will admit that we first heard this song on an 8-track in our cousin’s car (thanks to Mike Gridley for having great taste in the summer of 1973, four years before Marc Bolan’s car-crash death), and until very recently only owned it in vinyl.

“This is a song, that I wrote when I was young,
And I called it, the broken hearted blues,
The air on that night, was tempered like a knife,
And the people wore the face masks of a clown,
Dawn it was long, misshapen and forlorn,
And his woman ran away without a smile.

Days of the earth, are unbroken changeless turf,
But the faces of the men are something else.
In the wind, as a boy, was a spacious sexual toy,
But baby, now he’s a toothless baggy man,
When the hills of the sun, make you feel that you are young,

Get good now, and face your face into the wind.

This is a song, that I wrote when I was young,
And I called it the broken hearted blues.”

We’re frankly not easily impressed by other music blogs since a lot of what’s done in the name of music-love is just re-hashed, cut-and-paste, shuck-and-jive (guilty as charged, your honor).  So when we discovered Said the Gramophone a few years back, we immediately took notice of the calligraphic cant and caliber of the literate writing.  The site’s writers bring new songs to your ears (oft-time legitimate newcomers that even we have not heard of–horrors!), while providing vivid vignettes and imaginative (to say the least) allegories that at least tangentially relate to the proffered songs.

What we also appreciate is that, like us, they refuse to go the way of advertising (though if Apple, let’s say, wanted to run a million dollar ad campaign on The Lefort Report, we’d consider kicking our ethics to the curb–but make it snappy would ya Jobs).  What this backbone necessitates, however, is that once per year (this year from June 13th to July 12th), Said the Gramophone makes “The Big Ask” for donations to enable them to continue to provide their high-caliber content to you, us and the world.  So go to their site at the embedded link provided above to read some of their fine writing and listen to a great song or two you have not heard, and then go HERE to donate to a quality site.  We did.

If you need further motivation to contribute, check out some of their writing excerpted below (found quickly and provided without song context; we’re sure you can find other entries at Said the Gramophone that exceed your needs and desires).

“Please let your guard down for this song. Let it stand in your room, in a beamed-up sun dress with unwashed hands. Let it look at all the stuff on your walls, in your drawers, under your bed and out the door. Let it eat crudités, take texts and smile, let it take showers and wrap gifts and make cards. Let it stay, breathless and grinning, a while.”

“Inside my body there is art waiting to escape. It shows up on the surface of my skin, in ink lines. The marks made on me by people who love me or fuck me over show up like magnet lines, like filings falling into place. As if the very beating of my heart drew patterns of travel and maps for the way back.”

“Teddy was 13 and under the impression that he was much more good-looking than he actually was. He wore his wing-tipped jeans like they didn’t fit like a rotten pear. He walked proudly with his chest sticking out in front, blissfully oblivious to his sinking hunched shoulders and his plunking, swishing gait. He spoke slowly, as if he poshly needed to taste all his syllables, taking no notice of his own condescending whine, nor the splay-toothed spittle that formed at the sides of his mouth. Despite having a voice like a seeping balloon, he enrolled himself in a local youth choir at the Briarcrest Community Center on Thursday nights.

He came into rehearsal for New Voices Youth Choir, always one of the first to arrive. He dropped his droopy satchel bag in the corner near the coat hooks and made his way to a group of three girls, chatting before things got started. “Hello lay-dees,” his voice creeped out of his throat like it were an insect, like it had its own eyes. The girls always dreaded a talk with Teddy, but always seemed to forget that it would happen, the way you only take notice of a leaky shower faucet when you’re actually in the shower; a problem that quickly gets itself forgotten, only to come back every time, with the pall and residue of an untended annoyance. “What-ever are you discussing amongst yourselves? Perhaps the weather?” The girls looked at him like a plate of left-out cheese, a sweaty, sagging, unduly proud pile, edges hardening by the second. “We’re talking about how to get beer this weekend. So…” Two of the girls closed their shoulders together, a gate denying entry, but Teddy stood motionless, his hands perched high up on his waist, pulling his shirt up with his hands placed icky on his bare skin. “Oh. Beer. Myself, I’m more partial to cock-tails.” One of the girls, the oldest, said with eyes firmly rolled, “Oh yeah?” The door opened and the instructor came in, sighed, and Teddy zeroed in on her; he had plenty of suggestions for new songs and special requests for solos. As he left the girls, he spoke without looking at them, “Yes. They certainly do take the edge off the day.” One girl, the tallest, looked lazily at his satchel, sad and dolloped in the corner, and wondered what-ever could be inside.”

“Considering that “When I Paint My Masterpiece” is an ode to all-consuming artistic striving, it’s ironic that my primary ambition in life is simply to listen to it all the time. My parents may worry about my financial security, but when it comes to listening to this song I have a gift, and not to vigorously pursue it would be a gross disservice to me and you. If it’s true that when a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it it doesn’t make a sound, then the very existence of Danko’s astounding bassline, not to mention that of the romantic interplay between Helm’s mandolin and Hudson’s accordion, depends upon a constant listener. I volunteer.”

The Mountain Goats came all the way from Durham, North Carolina to Santa Barbara, and despite illness and the ill-conceived absences (without leave) of Santa Barbara’s music fans, the band took over Soho and took us to the musical mountaintop.  But we were also deftly guided by voice (leader John Darnielle‘s) back to the realities of life at sea level (and some depths further below).

The Mountain Goats 0riginally consisted of only John Darnielle, but now have swelled to a whopping three “permanent members” including Peter Hughes on bass and Jon “Funny Man” Wurster on drums (with Yuval Semo added on tour on guitar and piquant piano).  The band has had a cult following for quite some time, but its fan ranks have exponentially expanded since 2002 following album releases such as “Tallahassee,” “The Sunset Tree,” “Get Lonely,” and especially this year’s stellar “All Eternals Deck.” The Mountain Goats have long been universally lauded by rock critics, with the uber-prolific Darnielle (over 600 songs to date) being hailed as one of America’s best lyricists and songwriters.  The New Yorker went so far as to call Darnielle “America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist.”  We agree, but only if the “non-hip hop” qualifier is removed.  In addition to being well-crafted, Darnielle never fails to hit a heartstring or twenty with his lyrics, which oft-times sing of good and bad family members (his abusive step-father falling into the latter category and finding his way into Darnielle’s songs).  And any band Colbert loves is OK by us.

Having never seen the band before, we were a little concerned when they came on at Soho last Friday and Darnielle let us know that he was sick with a fever.  But Darnielle quickly allayed those concerns by slipping into his best “Show Must Go On” guise and giving a particularly strong reading of Liza Forever Minnelli, and continuing to gather momentum and strength thereafter.  Liza Forever Minnelli was a great reminder that Darnielle actually grew up in San Luis Obispo and lived in and attended college in Claremont/Pomona before forming the band and eventually moving to Durham, North Carolina.  In Liza, Darnielle laments his inability to divorce himself from his California upbringing and some of its trappings (“Never get away never get away I am never ever gonna get away from this place”).  And as we have grown so sick of the hoary chestnut, we particularly love the line:  “Anyone here mentions ‘Hotel California’ dies before the first line clears his lips.”  Absolutely agreed.

Throughout their set the Mountain Goats vacillated between feverish verve and slow, rending rounds of sound that were carried by Darnielle’s impassioned vocals and strident strumming on guitar (despite his fever), Jon Wurster’s drilling drumming, and Peter Hughes’ subtle bass and harmonies.   Set highlights included San Bernardino, Southwood Plantation Road, Birth Of Serpents, Damn These Vampires, Up with Wolves and Boxcar (Jawbreaker cover).

But the night was rendered revelatory by a few songs in particular.  Darnielle introduced Tyler Lambert’s Grave by telling the story of a women who had passed away.  Tyler Lambert was her homeless son who in turn left far too soon.  A poignant song and moment that you can listen to below.  Darnielle has said about the song:  “In 1993 or ’94, I wrote a song about Dana Plato, who was then a former child star on a downward slide; her story seemed so sad to me. She died young, a few years later, leaving a son behind. His name was Tyler Lambert, and he took his life last year, and the news stories I read ran a picture of this young man looking like young men often look: full of hope and promise, at the beginning of life. My heart broke for all the pain in that family, and I wrote the song.”  You can read more about the song, and it’s context and meaning at Seattle Weekly’s Reverb blog HERE.  The lyrics follow:

“Steal the last across the country under moonlight soft and wet
And at the dead of night I hear from things you can’t forget
spend daylight in dark tunnels where the demons rave
One day closer everyday to Tyler Lambert’s grave

Shoplift when you have to, keep your visor low
If your hunger shames you never let them know
Feel your sadness lifting, ride it like a wave
That sets you gently down beside Tyler Lambert’s grave

Fall into a pattern, never get unstuck
Anyone who can’t relate should thank God for his love

Young man in a yellow tie, hair gel in his hair
No context for the picture, just kind of standing there
Tyler, step outside the shadow of your great catastrophe
Dream all night of freedom, never wake up free”

Also hard hitting were All Eternal Deck’s best song, Never Quite Free, and the band’s crowd-pleasing “anthems”, This Year and No Children.

But the song that most took us aback was Matthew 25:21.  Darnielle explained that this song described the last time he had been in  Santa Barbara (having flown across country to visit his mother-in-law in her last, cancer-ridden days).   Check out the lyrics and a performance of the song below (in the video Darnielle noticeably cracks at the word “cancer”).  As he sang it at Soho, there was not a dry eye in the place (and particularly not in our 24″ x 24″ floor space).  These are the places where heart and art rarely meet.

“They hook you up
To a fentanyl drip
To mitigate the pain a little bit
I flew in
From Pennsylvania
When I heard the hour was coming fast
And I docked in Santa Barbara
Tried to brace myself
You can’t brace yourself
When the time comes
You just have to roll with the blast
And I’m an eighteen-wheeler headed down the interstate
And my brakes are going to give
And I won’t know till it’s too late
Tires screaming when I lose control
Try not to hurt too many people when I roll

Find the Harbor Freeway
And head south
Real tired
Head kind of light
I found Telegraph Road
I’d only seen the name on envelopes
Found the parking lot
And turned right
I felt all the details
Carving out space in my head
Tropicanas on the walk way
Neon red
Between the pain
And the pills trying to hold it at bay
Stands a traveler going far away
And I’m an airplane tumbling wing over wing
Try to listen to my instruments
They don’t say anything
People screaming when the engines quit
I hope we’re all in crash position when we hit

And at last came to your bedside
And as it turns out
I’m not ready
And then as though
You were speaking through a thick haze
You said hello to me
We all stood there around you
Happy to hear you speak
The last of something bright burning
Still burning
Beyond the cancer and the chemotherapy
And you were a presence full of light upon this earth
And I am a witness to your life and to it’s worth
It’s three days later when I get the call
And there’s nobody around to break my fall”

And of course we would be remiss to not include the passage from the song’s title:

“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’”

We would also be remiss if we didn’t give a little “pep-talk” at this point to Central Coast music lovers. Look people, the Mountain Goats packed the Fillmore in San Francisco and the El Rey in LA just days before they played Santa Barbara.  Where were you SB?  You don’t want to get a reputation as a weak musical place packed with old people (and their parents) that don’t attend great concerts do you?  Let’s go!

Check out some other great examples of the band live below, and the Soho setlist way below.

JOHN DARNIELLE | Autoclave — A Take Away Show from one shot seattle on Vimeo.

Mountain Goats – Woke Up New (Directed by Rian Johnson) from rcjohnso on Vimeo.

Soho Setlist:

Liza Minnelli Forever
Jeff David County Blues
Estate Sale Sign
San Bernardino
Southwood Plantation Road
Quito
Birth Of Serpents

Tyler Lambert’s Grave (With Yuval)

•solo•
Color In Your Cheeks
Going to Cleveland
You Were Cool
Up The Wolves
Matthew 25:21

•Full Band•
Damn These Vampires
Broom People
Age Of Kings
Prowl Great Cain
Never Quite Free
This Year

•Encore•
Boxcar
No Children

Opening for the Mountain Goats were Durham, North Carolina’s Midtown Dickens, who played with alternating composure and frenzied abandon, and whose energy and harmonies tickled the dickens (both the midtown, but also the upper eastside portions) out of us.  Check ’em out below at Soho.