OK, this seals it.  We’ve seen the brash Brit-band Palma Violets perform live in various video formats and on late night shows, but never in person.  And we’ve heard from trustworthy sources about the band’s manic shows. Now comes the band’s new video for Rattlesnake Highway (off their acclaimed debut album 180), and we hereby commit to not missing their next show within our concert realm. Watch below as the band is rapturously captured live in fan videos, interspersed (for some reason) with shots of snake worshipers.  Catch them out on tour soon.  They return to Cali in two week (including at the El Rey in LA on 10/19).  The band’s current tour dates can be found HERE.

One of our favorites, Elbow, came across the Pond in 2011 to play the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco (happening again this coming weekend).  For those in attendance, it was one of the most magnificent, heartwarming performances of that or any other year.  You simply must see this band live.  Get it on your bucket list now.

We were thrilled yesterday when Elbow announced on their website both the release of a new concert recording/DVD entitled Live at Jodrell Bank, and the release next March of its 6th studio album (tentatively titled All At Once), with touring to begin shortly thereafter in the UK .  With respect to the Live release, approximately 12,000 people watched Elbow’s performance near the Lovell radio telescope.  You see, Elbow frontman Guy Garvey is an amateur astronomer, and the event also featured speeches from over 80 scientists.

About the impending new studio album, Garvey said this about the working title of the album:  “”When you’re 40, you’re all ages at once, because you’re thinking of your youth, which has very definitely passed, and about how you became the person you are. You wonder about how the rest of your life plays out from here.”

Today, Elbow released an excellent excerpted performance from the new Live at Jodrell Bank DVD of the much-loved Grounds For Divorce.  Watch below and be wowed.

Moby showed up on Conan last night in support of his new album Innocents.  In Black Flag shirt, Moby brought a huge entourage in his now-standard all-white attire, including devastatingly-great singer-songwriter Damien Jurado. Check out below as the group performs The Perfect Life (sans, but a la, Wayne Coyne), and then (in a web-exclusive) Almost Home, with Jurado hurling his dulcet-distinctive vocals into the song.  On the song’s chorus, the troupe segues into a mass singalong that sounds akin to, but dares to dwarf, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon.  That’s beauty right there.  Bravo!  Moby begins a mini-tour tomorrow night, playing the Henry Fonda Theater three nights in a row.

The astonishingly-talented Amanda Palmer seems to live at the extreme ends of the pathos-to-bathos spectrum, and less so in between. On one song Palmer’s effortlessly inducing heartfelt tears, and on the next she’s got you in tears of joy.  Falling into the latter category, watch below as Palmer and her popular author and husband Neil Gaiman collaborated last year in Seattle on a cute cover of the old standard, Makin’ Whoopee (and we ain’t talkin’ Goldberg).  Ya gotta love the sly spousal interplay.

Two of our favorites, Joseph Arthur and Greg Dulli (Afghan Whigs), recently got together (again) for a One On One session and performed Take Me Home from Arthur’s Let’s Just Be album.  The song was co-written with the Lonely Astronaut’s Kraig Jarret Johnson (Golden Smog, Jayhawks).  Watch below as Arthur hits all the right vocal notes while Dulli devastates on keys last month in Brooklyn.  It’ll take you home on a Monday.

The song’s lyrics follow the video.

“Take Me Home”

Take me home
Look good on your own
Take me home
Look good

I can see the sun
I think the evening’s done
Take me home
You look good on your own

Sometimes it’s good
To say goodbye
Before you make it
To the end of time
Yes, sometimes it’s good
To say goodbye
Before you make it
To the end of time

Take me home
Take me home
Look good on your own

I can see the sun
I think we just begun
Please take me home
You look good

Sometimes it’s good
To say goodbye
Before you make it
To the end of time
Sometimes it’s good
To say goodbye
Before you make it
To the end of time

Take me home
I can see the sun
Take me home

Watch below as Crackerfarm captures Seth Avett performing song-crafty Brandi Carlisle’s Save Part of Yourself on the High Line in NYC, all the while un-apprehended by passersby.  Seth and the rest of The Avett Brothers bring their lively and lovely onslaught to the Santa Barbara Bowl on October 10th.

Arcade Fire made their way to NYC last night and performed on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live.   With the band about to release their new album Reflector, anticipation was running high for the performance.  Watch below as the band is joined by saxophone colossus Colin Stetson for the album’s title song along with new track Afterlife.  Following SNL, the band was featured in a special 30-minute special entitled Here Comes the Night Time, some of which was taken from recent shows in Montreal.  The film also featured an array of skits featuring Bono, Rainn Wilson, Bill Hader, Zach Galifianakis, Aziz Ansari, Ben Stiller, James Franco, and Michael Cera.   In the film, the band debuted three more new songs: Here Comes The Night Time, We Exist, and Normal Person.  Check out all below in the order discussed above.

It’s been a long, long time, but we still recall being wowed a time or two in the mid-70s by Jerry Jeff Walker at the Santa Barbara County Bowl (before the “County” was excised).  Walker wrote many song chestnuts, including Mr. Bojangles, but where his shows came alive was towards the end when he would break out cunning covers of songs, but in particular super songwriter Guy Clark’s LA Freeway.  If there was anything Central Coast folks desired, it was to stay off of LA’s freeways, and Jerry Jeff always delivered it with his trademark gruff-verve.  We’re new-found fans of Rose Cousins (and now Jordie Lane), so watch below as they gamely cover LA Freeway at a country-lane pace.  Afterwards, check out Walker performing the song on the Dinah Shore Show, of all places.  The song’s lyrics are at bottom.

LA Freeway:

“Pack up all the dishes
Make a note of all good wishes
Say goodbye to the landlord for me
All you know he always bored me

And throw out all those L.A. papers
The moldy box of Vanilla Wafers
Adios to all this concrete
Gonna get me some dirt road back streets

Now here’s to you old Skinny Dennis
The only one I think I will miss
I can hear those bass notes ringin’
As sweet and low like a gift your bringin’

So play it for me one more time now
You got to give it all you can now
Well I believe every word you’re sayin’
Just to keep on keepin’ on, keep on playin’

Well if I can just get off of that L.A. freeway
Without getting killed or caught
Down the road in a cloud of smoke
To some land that, baby, we ain’t bought
If I can just get off this L.A. freeway

Leave the key card in the mailbox
Leave the key in that old front lock
They can find it likely as not
There must be somethin’ we have forgot

Oh, Susanna don’t you cry babe
Love’s a gift and truly handmade
We got somethin’ to believe in
Texas is callin’, baby, it’s time we were leavin’

Well I can just get off of this L.A. freeway
Without getting killed or caught
Down the road in a cloud of smoke
To some land that, baby, we ain’t bought

If I can just get off this L.A. freeway
Without getting killed or caught
They can never gonna to catch me
Put down the rod to somewhere we found it

I can just get off of this L.A. freeway
Hey Texas is callin’, callin’ me home”

Let’s say it’s Friday. Let’s say it’s mid-afternoon. And let’s say you’re wanting something musical to enhance your post-lunch catatonia as you prepare to prepare for the weekend and semi-mindlessly push the balls into other people’s courts to ruin/make their weekends. And let’s say the perfect soundtrack is a song performed by the The Robert Glasper Experiment, which attempts to bridge the gaps between electronica, indie, rap, soul, pop and jazz music (emphasis on the latter).  No small feat, but said and done.

Check out the band below via KEXP covering Smells Like Teen Spirit, and making it entirely their own.  After check out I Can’t Help It and All Matter .  Clearly our virulent vocoder-hate is abating.  Somewhat.

The band will soon release their new album Black Radio 2 (the cleverly-named follow-up to the prior Black Radio), which you can pre-order HERE.  The impressive list of guest vocalists on the new album includes, amongst others, Macy Gray, Common, Jill Scott, Anthony Hamilton, Faith Evans, Norah Jones, Snoop Dogg, Lupe Fiasco, and Emeli Sandé.  Bravo!