Montreal’s très intelligent bandThe Luyas loudly impressed us in 2012 with their album Animator (Dead Oceans).  To get a better feel for the band, check out this phenomenal-sounding performances of Face, Fifty/Fifty and Channeling for Here Today Sessions at Supersonic Studios in Copenhagen.

Morrissey played the Sovereign Performing Arts Center in Reading, Pennsylvania last night to his usual throng of adoring fans.  When Moz and his crack band came to the night’s encore, The Smith’s How Soon Is Now?, a young fan came up on stage (at :57 in the video below) and jumped on Morrissey’s back (followed later by what might have been his father).  When Moz realized his attacker was but a boy, he hugged him until security pulled the boy away.  Morrissey, noticeably taken aback by the events, then retreated to the back of the stage to gather himself.  When he comes back to sing at 1:37, Moz appears to have been moved by the boy’s affection.  A sweet moment from one of the most adored singers in rock history.  He is human, and he is clearly loved.  Morrissey and the fellas will hit the West Coast in the last week of February and early March (tour dates can be seen below the video).  Between Johnny Marr’s impending new album and Morrissey’s tour, it’s been quite a Smiths winter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-HGTse-KeI&feature=em-uploademail

We have written before of Coeur de Pirate, the nom de chanson of charmant French-Canadian Beatrice Martin.  Martin has now released the official video for Place de la Republique, which tells a love story doomed by long distance.  The video for the song from her much-loved album Blonde was shot entirely in Paris.  The song’s lyrics (loosely translated) follow the video.  You can also check out a live performance of Place de la Republique HERE.

“We met in the time when we would please
the demands we created but we got lost in them
You’re only a few kilometers away
And our hearts, our hearts have stayed in this sea
I ran along the Seine
Hoping to find you, you serene soul
I ran without knowing how
or why we get carried away
We only knew each other for a moment

And I don’t know if you’re worth it anymore
It’s rather hard to be sure
And when you are in Vincennes
That evening, don’t forget me
I will wait for you long enough to say
that I wanted to take the greatest risk
An evening that made me so sad
An evening at Republique Square

And as you can see it’s the end
I must cross the ocean tomorrow morning
From your arms I will slide out ever so gently
And it’s reality that awaits me
I know your heart is already inhabited
by one or more girls that have marked you
I’m less strong than the other
But I hope strongly that you miss me
That I stand out so much

And I don’t know if you’re worth it anymore
It’s rather hard to be sure
And when you are in Vincennes
That evening, don’t forget me
I will wait for you long enough to say
that I wanted to take the greatest risk
An evening that made me so sad
An evening at Republique Square”

Britain’s Jessie Ware came to light last year and appeared on many Best of 2012 lists with her album Devotion and several singles from it.  We wrote about her torch-singing ways back in July, and if you want to see some more stellar performances (especially the Black Cab Session) by her, go to that post HERE.  Ware’s now on tour in the US and appeared on Jimmy Fallon to play her popular song Wildest Moments with The Roots.  Check it out below.  Girl can sing (oh, and she cleans up well too).  And ya gotta love Quest’s gunshot drumming.  Ware plays LA and San Francisco next week (see the dates below the video).

The interweb is a wondrous thing.  Spin has unearthed the video below by Youtuber “AlRosePromotions” who uploaded a never-aired 2000 VH1 pilot for multitalented Jon Brion’s show.  The great Elliot Smith is featured throughout the pilot.  Check out Brad Mehldau, Elliot Smith and Brion all get in the act in the a free-form session below.  Brion and Smith perform several duets as well.    In addition to his sterling originals, Smith covers of The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset, John Lennon’s Jealous Guy and Big Star’s Nighttime.  Elliot you are sorely missed!  Watch the entire episode below before someone takes it down.

Santa Monica band Cayucas is coming to Velvet Jones next Wednesday as openers (with Races) for El Ten Eleven.  We unearthed Cayucas last fall when they signed to Secretly Canadian and released their breezy, addicting song Cayucos,with its playful accompanying video (seen way below).  With Central Coast beach-centric lyrics/optics, reverbed vocals and hazy harmonies, the song and video were sure to be hits at Chez Lefort.  The band, which is the brainchild of Zach Yudin, followed up Cayucos with the release in December of their similarly clever, breezy and ’60s-inflected song Swimsuit (just listen below to that organ and handclap ending).  Cayucas sounds a bit like The Beach Boys as interpreted/produced by Animal Collective (minus some of the latter’s distracting density).  We can’t wait to hear what talented producer Richard Swift (of The Shins) does for the young band on their impending new album for Secretly Canadian.  In the meantime, check out both songs and videos below, and get ye to Velvet Jones next Wednesday!

We were decidedly blown away by Charles Bradley when we last caught his act at Soho in the summer of 2011.  It did not hurt Bradley that he was brilliantly backed by one of the best R&B bands we’d ever heard–The Menahan Street Band.  To put it simply, they rolled the joint; but effortlessly and without being peacocky (the tendency of some backup bands). While Bradley worked on new material last year, the Menahans took time to record and release their critically-acclaimed album The Crossing on Daptone Records (naturally).  To get a better feel for the band and album, check out two performances by the band of songs off of The Crossing for KEXP.  The first, Lights Out, features heralding horns followed by ’60s organ and ravishing guitar-play.  Below it, Three Faces starts and ends with Latin swagger, but in between and strewn throughout are some fantastic wah-wah and surf-guitar sounds.  That’s what you want–right there.

Lights Out:

Three Faces:

LA’s Milo Greene was busy last year after garnering attention accompanying Civil Wars on its tour in late 2011.   We caught them at Muddy Waters last February, and then watched as they made the talk show rounds (Letterman and Conan) in support of their eponymous debut album.  We’d lost track of them until we unearthed the video below (via Line of Best Fit and Open Sessions) of them performing their song Perfectly Aligned.  Check out the video’s slight of hand in which the band is driving a VW van and ostensibly singing unplugged (though how DO they attain those reverbed vocals for Marlana Sheetz?).  Regardless, we far prefer this spare version to the album version.  The spare sound found here amplifies the song’s atmospherics.  After, is the song’s official video.

Earlier today Okkervil River’s tremendously talented leader Will Sheff announced that he had gone underground.  Literally.  Sheff explains:  “In the early part of last year I finally got a dedicated recording space. It was something I’d dreamed of having for my whole life but I had never really been able to make it work until then. It’s located in Brooklyn, in a basement down by the East River, a dingy but high-ceilinged room at the end of a long, damp hallway. In the late 90s a writer named John Wray had lived in this one room and he wrote his first novel there, sleeping inside a tent to keep out the rats. I think that story clinched it for me when I was looking at it. I liked the idea of so much thinking happening there. I started going in [to the space] and working every day of the week there, just shutting the door and writing until evening. I decided to do a project there I’d wanted to do for years and years, which is to make an album by myself and for myself, an album that doesn’t owe anything to music I made before. When I finished the album I decided I’d give some the songs away for free since it cost almost nothing to make.  The name of the project is Lovestreams.”

With Lovestreams, Sheff has gone Postal (Service) and taken a page out of Ben Gibbard’s electronic book (although Sheff’s is a solo side-project).  Today Sheff has released new song Shock Corridor under the Lovestreams moniker.  And now we can’t stop hitting repeat (at eleven, and not holding) and re-reading the song’s lyrics.  Once again, Sheff has combined a scintillating soundtrack with carefully honed, cutting lyrics, and destroyed us.  Sheff has done so for years in the primarily guitar-driven Okkervil River, but the new machined-sounds mesh perfectly with the word-alliterati on these basement-tapes.  There are few in music writing lyrics as incisive as Sheff’s (only John Darnielle, John K. Samson, Conor Oberst (say what you will, haters), and Leonard Cohen immediately come to mind).  Anyone writing lyrics as stirring and penetrating as the following deserves your undivided attention: “A pictorial of you alone in your room, fighting off suicide furiously, with the Astronettes bootleg and a bent-back spoon,” and “A lie for a single pageview[Lefort–don’t we know], courtesy of the assailant-who-loves-you,” and “So punch the day in the face and charge through a haze of gorse [Lefort-nice gisduise], behind you, your own mother’s living ghost tears her hair out.”  Pick out your own favorites below.  We can’t wait to hear more from Sheff and Lovestreams.   Listen to this great song below and can go HERE to download your own copy.

Shock Corridor

A life lifted off a news page.
A pictorial of you alone in your room, fighting off suicide furiously, with the Astronettes bootleg and a bent-back spoon.
A bus tour through drab poverty.
I came over and you offered me the guest room.
A lie for a single pageview, courtesy of the assailant-who-loves-you.
Advice for the heartsick clergyman.
The snake in the grass and the ghost at the feast, the jack of all asses and the last of the least are all flown, first-class, to the team retreat.
The inventor of anger.
The perfector of being distracted when someone is talking to you, but just slightly – super slightly.
She said, “I don’t care who you are and don’t care what you were – you can’t look away from the Shock Corridor.”
So punch the day in the face and charge through a haze of gorse.
Behind you, your own mother’s living ghost tears her hair out.
It’s freedom – don’t you want it?
A light haze of rain dark-flecks the grey slate.
The actor can’t escape from his cold oval.
Blazed-out hours, rolling, cold and (relatively) sober, as she says, “I don’t care who you are and don’t care what you were – you can’t get away from the Shock Corridor.”
When there was nothing left to talk about, we talked specifically about a white-hot penny plunging through the concrete and hissing into that buried river.
Or cutting into the earth’s red-hot sobbing heart.
And I’m sorry I was a shit.
I didn’t know why I was doing it.
I’m not needed, and why would you really want to hear my voice even?
I’m the light from a star that deserved to implode, and did, six million years ago.
I’m the Orange Crush can, crumpled in the woods, when the kid who tossed it is going through his third divorce.
I used to lie back in my teenage bed and feel love – so much heart-busting love, just this surge of love for everything, everything, everything…
Now I lie on the couch with my brains bashed out and my tools and my toys all lying around, and I wish I could feel that way about really anything, anything, anything, anything…
Still, she says, “I don’t care who you are and don’t care what you were.
You can’t get away from the Shock Corridor.”