Many have said that we don’t know The Very Best (cha! don’t vex I!).  Say what you will, but all that ended last month when we discovered a heart-rending performance by the duo of singer Esau Mwamwaya and producer Johan Hugo (who go forth under the humble moniker, The Very Best).  At the time of our discovery, we couldn’t find much on the ensemble and feared the worst.  Thankfully,  The Very Best have just announced that they will release a new album in 2015.   The new album was recorded in Mali’s M’dala Chikowa Village.  Below you can watch/listen to the first single from the album, Hear Me.  We love the hypnotic song, with sublime bass added by Vampire Weekend’s Chris Baio.   Check out the time-lapse video below in which Hugo filmed M’dala Chikowa Village.  We love this track and hope for deliverance from the Mali (and other) oppressors.

Hugo has this to say about the song and video:

Hear Me:

“We wrote this song in May 2014, only days before the Malawi general elections. It was also the 50th anniversary for Malawi independence from colonial rule. One day we where sitting outside the house listening to the radio and Joyce Banda (the president that day) was talking about something to do with the election and progress, or lack of progress for Malawi as a nation. We put an iPhone next to the radio and recorded some of her voice. That’s the voice you can hear in the beginning of the song. Esau really wanted to write a song about the corruption, poverty, struggle of Malawi, and how frustrated he was about the fact that very little has changed since independence. We recorded the whole song that day, and the next day we asked the local church choir to come in and record some choir vocals for it. As with most vocals and instrumentation on this record, we recorded them outdoors, on the beach, singing the bridge and last chorus with Esau. Back in London a month later, Chris Baio from Vampire Weekend came in and played bass on the song.”

And the video:

“Between writing songs and recording, we would climb the mountains above the lake and set the camera up to take time lapses. any time we wanted a break we would bring the camera on a tripod to the shop or to someones small house and always leave it taking time lapses. we would sit for hours in the dark while the camera clicked away, working on a song, tweaking melodies or words. mosquitos everywhere. Sometimes we would leave the camera running and trek back to the house, hoping none would find it.”

We look forward to much more of The Very Best.

Oh what we wouldn’t have done to catch a show on the fantastic Damon Albarn & The Heavy Seas tour.  The tour is being touted as the Best of 2014, and from what we’ve seen we cannot disagree (due deference to Elbow and The National).  Both tonight and last night at Albert Hall in London, Albarn and his fabulous ensemble of singers and players were joined by the brilliant Brian Eno, Blur’s Graham Coxson and De La Soul.  Check out below as Eno joins for the recent, Sunday-perfect Heavy Seas of Love, Coxson joining for Blur’s feel-good song Tender, and De La Soul joining for Gorillaz’ Feel Good Inc.  There was beauty and magic to behold, and thankfully several  fans captured the proceedings.  Check out the videos below of those three performances. Included first are alternative videos of Heavy Seas of Love, the first better visually and the second better sounding.  What a heartwarming, joyous way to end a concert.  Bravo Damon (and Eno)!  Afterwards watch as Tender was its usual beautiful self and Feel Good Inc. was just that.  There you have it: a hat trick of love and good will.  What could be better on a Sunday?

Heavy Seas of Love (better visual):

Heavy Seas of Love (better sound):

Tender:

Feel Good Inc.:

The great Kendrick Lamar performed last night on Saturday Night Live and simply slaughtered.  Again.  Lamar and large ensemble first raged through his new single, i, sporting spooky contact lenses, dancing, adding some libbing, and ending the song ferociously.  Later, Chantal Kreviazuk opened and collaborator Jay Rock set up Kendrick to deliver the track Pay For It.  So dang good.

Check ’em both below.

In the interest of time, we advise/remind that Charlottesville, Virginia’s The Sons of Bill (literally, three brothers whose dad is “Bill”) are playing the Lobero Theater tonight.  They are out in support of their buzz-worthy, brand new album Love and Logic.  To get a feel for the band, check out three songs from the new album.  First up is the just-released live video of the driving song Bad Dancer (which starts off reminding of Modern English’s I Melt With You but moves forward from there), followed by the audio for the pop-majestic Brand New Paradigm (which would be atop the charts in an ideal world, with its Beatles, Lennon and Elton influences and harmonies), and finally the homespun Lost In The Cosmos (Song For Chris Bell) (with vocals that remind of Yoni Wolf of the great Why? band).

To sum up:  we whole-heartedly subscribe to The Sons of Bill and this vow from another song, Hymnsong, off the new album:

“We’re convinced that there’s a cadence to the murmurs in the dark,
rapt in patient arbitration, between our weary head and heart,
til’ our spirits cease their raging in the silence of the night,
we’ll look for love and logic in the dying of the light.”

The band is out on tour and you can see the rest of the post-Lobero dates HERE (including tomorrow night at the Great American Music Hall in SF).

It’s been a rare throwback week on The Lefort Report, featuring the imprimatur throughout of the greatest, Bob Dylan.  Between last weekend’s The New Basement Tapes’ performance, and two new, Dylan-esque songs by Bonnie “Prince” Billie and Houndmouth, it’s been a downright Robert Zimmerman week.  To finish it off, we give you below two more performances by The New Basement Tapes (Marcus Mumford, Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith, Elvis Costello, My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, and Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Rhiannon Giddens), who were recently brought together by producer T-Bone Burnett to add musical life to a collection of previously lost, circa-Basement Tapes lyrics by Dylan.

Without further ado, first check out below their performance of Kansas City on Ellen (we love the harmonies supplied by Giddens, Goldsmith and James to go with the best use yet of Marcus Mumford on lead).  After, check out the performance (featuring Costello on lead vocal) on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon of the title track of the ensemble’s new album, Lost On The River.  Great stuff from this super-group.

Sylvan Esso’s addicting song Coffee may very well end up as our Best Song of 2014.  Time will tell, but certainly we’ve sang its/their praises since early-adopting the song in January.

Last night the duo (Amealia Meath and Nick Sanborn) were the musical guests on Conan.   Check out Coffee and web-exclusive Hey Mami below.  While we’ve heard both before, the duo has added interesting inflections and even more space to the songs, and Meath has Feisted/Joni-ed/Rickie-d her vocals in spots, all to great effect.  We love this act.

Sylvan Esso opens for Foster The People tomorrow night (Saturday) at the Santa Barbara Bowl.  Get there in time to catch ’em–the show starts at 6:30 pm.

Coffee:

Hey Mami:

We’ve been fans of the Indiana band Houndmouth since we first laid ears on them back in 2012 .  In that same year they were signed to Rough Trade and released the critically-acclaimed album From the Hills Below the City.  Heretofore we’ve loved the much-vaunted verve and drive of the band live, and leaders Matt Myers and Katie Toupin in particular.

Houndmouth is currently at work on their sophomore album (as yet untitled), which will be released in 2015.  And now they’ve released the first song from these sessions, a dramatic downshift entitled For No One.  In contrast to their prior program, For No One is a superb, spare and intense ballad sung in the key of Dylan and delivered with vivid, Dylan-esque imagery (including one more reference in song to Kon Tiki).  Bravo!  Check it out below.

Following our piece yesterday on Neil Young and given being hopelessly mired in the new Basement Tapes Raw release from Bob Dylan, there was something quite conjoining this morning when we happened upon the new single (New Black Rich (Tusks)) from Bonnie “Prince” Billy.  The song wouldn’t have been out of place amongst Young’s harrowing hat-trick and has allusions to Dylan lyrics within (“and the times they are not a-changing fast enough”), and is the latest from Bonnie’s recently-released, critically-acclaimed new album, Singer’s Grave a Sea of Tongues.  The new album is produced by the regular Bonnie-collaborator  Mark Nevers (see the previous Bonny albums Lie Down In the Light and Master and Everyone).

As you’ll hear below, New Black Rich (Tusks) is a heartfelt, ennui-ridden ballad (“I’ll say goodbye before we meet”) with an On The Beach-meter that features the perfect accompaniment of Billy Contreras on fiddle, Chris Scruggs on mandolin and Emmett Kelly on guitar, all of whom add a handsome hue and sepia-tones.

As you can view below, Bonnie has now released the song’s official video (directed by Claudia Crobatia) that tells an off-kilter love story (imagine that, from Bonnie “Prince” Billy).  In the video, the be-tusked Bonnie walks into a bar (no joke) and finds a beautiful, be-hooved singer who he slow-dances with.  Who hasn’t felt be-tusked or be-hooved at times while out in this world of ours?  The song and the video are beasts of beauty.

Everybody “knows” Neil Young (and this is nowhere).  But we’ve found that only a subset of folks younger than 50 actually know three consecutively-released albums from the mid-70s that define Neil Young for us.  There’s a reason for that.  Unless you held on to your turntable and owned the vinyl versions of these albums before the world went digital, the good part of a generation didn’t have much opportunity to hear Young’s harrowing hat-trick of consecutively great records:  Tonight’s the Night, On The Beach, and Zuma.   On The Beach was released in 1974, went out of print on vinyl in 1980 and wasn’t released digitally until 2003.  Tonight’s The Night and Zuma, both released on vinyl in 1975, weren’t released on compact disc until 1990.  So 15-30 years lapsed between when these albums were originally released on vinyl and when they were released digitally.  To sum up (in the words of the Talking Heads):  “Some of you people just about missed it!”  And that is a crying shame because some of the most original and emotionally-charged music in all of rock n’ roll appeared on these three albums.  As has been written about more thoroughly elsewhere and everywhere, these three albums comprised Young’s emotional reaction to a rash of events:  stardom encountered following the commercial success of Young’s album Harvest; the trials and tribulations of being in the super-group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; the overdose deaths of entourage members Bruce Berry and Danny Whitten; and Young’s failed relationships.  All were fodder for one of the greatest creative periods in Young’s musical life.  And in our book, you can’t praise much more than that.

On the Beach was inspired in part by the overdose deaths of Danny Whitten in 1972 and Young’s roadie Bruce Berry the following year.  Young wrote and recorded the harrowing, wee-small-hours Tonight’s the Night late in 1973, but first released On the Beach.  Young released Tonight’s the Night the next year.  He then finished off the hat-trick by releasing the rocking Zuma later that same year.  As mentioned, despite containing some of Young’s best songs, Tonight’s The Night was rejected by his label for being too unpolished and grim (just listen below to Young’s heartfelt, ravaged vocals on Mellow My Mind and his soul-reduced Tired Eyes).  So Young instead offered up the barely-less ominous album On The Beach. Hence the latter’s being released first.

Taking these albums in their proper chronological order, Tonight’s The Night features several of our favorite songs by the artist and of all-time, including Borrowed Tune, Albuquerque (decrying notoriety), Tired Eyes, the title track and Mellow My Mind.

On The Beach features the signature songs Ambulance Blues (damning his critics, amongst other things–lyrics at bottom), the title track (rejecting stardom), Motion Pictures (an elegy on his relationship with then-wife Carrie Snodgrass), For The Turnstiles and the raving Revolution Blues (about Charles Manson).

And finally, Zuma contains a quiver of the best songs Young’s ever recorded, including the astonishingly great Barstool Blues, Don’t Cry No Tears, Pardon My Heart, Through My Sails and, why not, Cortez The Killer (in case you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard it).

If you haven’t heard (or even if you have) any of the songs mentioned above, check them out below.  And if you don’t own these three album masterpieces, add them soon to your collection.

Ambulance Blues

Back in the old folky days
The air was magic when we played.
The riverboat was rockin’
in the rain
Midnight was the time
for the raid…

All along the Navajo Trail,
Burn-outs stub their toes
on garbage pails.
Waitresses are cryin’
in the rain
Will their boyfriends
pass this way again?

I guess I’ll call it
sickness gone
It’s hard to say
the meaning of this song.
An ambulance can only
go so fast
It’s easy to get buried
in the past

When you try to make
a good thing last.

So all you critics sit alone
You’re no better than me
for what you’ve shown.
With your stomach pump and
your hook and ladder dreams
We could get together
for some scenes.

I never knew a man
could tell so many lies
He had a different story
for every set of eyes.
How can he remember
who he’s talkin’ to?
‘Cause I know it ain’t me,
and I hope it isn’t you.

Well, I’m up in T.O.
keepin’ jive alive,
And out on the corner
it’s half past five.
But the subways are empty
And so are the cafes.

Except for the Farmer’s Market
And I still can hear him say:
You’re all just pissin’
in the wind
You don’t know it but you are.

And there ain’t nothin’
like a friend
Who can tell you
you’re just pissin’
in the wind.

I never knew a man
could tell so many lies
He had a different story
for every set of eyes
How can he remember
who he’s talking to?
Cause I know it ain’t me,
and hope it isn’t you.