Wye Oak’s “Civilian” is on our list of Best Albums (So Far) of 2011.  Check ’em playing Holy Holy off of Civilian on the Fallon Show Monday night.  Pay particular attention to Andy Stack’s drum-and-keyboard attack.  Give that lad another hand.

We are going to Glastonbury in 2013*.  We have a new quest.  Thanks to the under-appreciated Palladia Channel, we have watched the highlights from every Glastonbury show since 2004.  It just gets better and better.  All bands kick it up five or ten notches for Glastonbury, and we have never seen better audiences to add fuel to the bands’ fires.  Whether it’s Blur, Radiohead or Arcade Fire, the results are the same. Year in, year out.

This year was no exception.  Radiohead and Pulp made surprise appearances, but the biggest surprise for us was Coldplay’s headlining set.  We had, we now admit, grown weary of Coldplay and their omnipresent songs.  For some time we’ve considered them a substandard U2/Radiohead combo.  But their Glastonbury performance provided a powerful dose of reality and showed how wrong we can be.  This band’s songs are filled with masterful melodies, and they are instinctual musicians that enliven and animate their songs in concert.  The new songs they played at Glastonbury bode well for their impending new album.  On paper their lyrics can seem somewhat insipid, but sung live and backed by the 175,000-member Glastonbury choir/audience they pack a powerful punch.

Check out three different video versions below of Coldplay playing Fix You. It’ll warm the cockles of your heart (whatever that means; it just seems apropos given Glastonbury’s southwest England locale).

Who knows, tears may stream down your face as you watch.  And you may be fixed for a time.

*We’d attend next year, but the organizers are passing given the Summer Olympics in England.  So we’ll have to wait until 2013.

We loved Superchunk in the early 90s (our fave being their classic album, “Foolish,” and the ensuing Slim‘s shows in San Francisco in support).  Now they’re back and sporting a new video for their song Learned to Surf (courtesy of Pitchfork.tv).  The video is an amalgam of live-in-Brazil concert footage from 1998 and earlier this year.  Check it out.

Saturday night we found ourselves with the necessary flu to safely justify a classic couch-flop, remote-control-driven, DVR extravaganza.  And so we went straight to VH1’s recent Storytellers episode featuring My Morning Jacket.  Simply put this is amongst a handful of the best musical performances ever captured on television.  Jim James (reluctantly) provides the narrative backdrop to the songs and comes off as an intelligent and gifted soul (especially touching is when he briefly loses it while introducing Dondante).  And of course his vocals scintillate throughout.

But what really captivates during the episode (and what had been somewhat lost in the sound-mix at their recent Santa Barbara Bowl show) is the mesmerizing, multi-instrumental playing of Carl Broemel. Broemel is that rare musical breed who is poly-proficient and yet plays sparely and soul-piercingly.   Check out Carl’s pedal steel playing on Golden below (the music begins at 3:45), and on Moving Away and Wonderful (elsewhere at Storytellers), his lead guitar thr0ughout (but in particular on Dondante and One Big Holiday), and his sax playing on Dondante. And the other members also provide perfect support.  Flu or not, the episode is highly recommended.  By the end of the viewing we were virtually healed.

Radiohead played a surprise set at this year’s Glastonbury music festival.  Check out the innovative full-concert video of the show comprised of an amalgam of fan videos cobbled together with mastered sound added.  This Interwebs thing just might take off some day.

Raphael Saadiq has been soulfully killing it since his days in the underrated Tony! Toni! Tone!, but he has gone on to break away from the R&B peloton with a revelatory solo career.  In March of this year he released yet another standard-setting album (his fourth), entitled “Stone Rollin’.”

From this album, Saadiq’s song Go to Hell takes us back to the great Soul Summer of ’71 and simply shouts summertime radio (good luck finding it on the dial though these days).  Saadiq takes Motown’s old soul and brightens its corners.  Tell your wife, husband, kids, grandparents and friends–soul is back courtesy of Saadiq.  Despite the song’s title this is no F-you (a la Cee-Lo), but instead a hard look in the mirror and an invitation to loving living.  Preach it, Raphael!  Check it out, and then the title track,  Stone Rollin’, below it.

Inspirational Verse from Go to Hell:

“Here’s the situation, yes the devil knows me well
See I’m trying to do my best not to go to hell!
I’m counting all my blessings, as I walk the narrow road,
Victory is near, that’s what I’ve been told!

I can feel it getting closer, closer every day
I wanna be a warrior of everything I say
There’s trials in the valley, take me upstream.
I need to feel this water falling down over me
Falling down over me!

I can see my name written across the sky,
Ravens started flying, I saw tears in their eyes.
There was fires in the mountains, and storms in the sea,
Winds in the valley, rushing into me.

Knock and it will open, seek and you’ll be fine,
You’re just a flower and the seed is your mind!
Clouds will bring us water, and the Sun will bring us heat
But we have the flower, moving from sea to sea.

Let love bring, us together,
Let love bring us together,
Let it bring us, let it bring us together!
Let love bring us together!

We need more love
We need more love in the world
Let it bring us, let it bring us together!

Somebody walk with me!
Somebody walk with me!
Somebody walk with me, walk with me quickly!

Let love bring us together!
Let love bring us together!”

When he’s on his game, Joseph Arthur is amongst our favorite songwriters.  His quartet of consecutive records put out last decade, consisting of Come to Where I’m From, Redemption’s Son, Our Shadows Will Remain, and Nuclear Daydream, set very lofty bars for Arthur to be measured against.  And the trouble is: sometimes he’s off his game.  It’s then that the world goes off-axis for us.

Thankfully, Joseph’s back full-on with a phenomenal new record entitled, “The Graduation Ceremony.” He can rock with the best of them, but he moves us most with his melancholy, heart-rending songs which are at times wrapped up in deceptively-upbeat musical cloaks.  The new album’s songs, Midwest and Love Never Asks You to Lie, are perfect examples of Arthur at his world-weary, wistful best.  Not all the songs off The Graduation Ceremony are as lyrically heavy as those two, but clearly Joseph’s feeding from the heartbreak muse on the new album.

We hail from the hail-ridden Midwest and its weight-of-the-world humidity summers.  So of course the first song we heard off the new album, Midwest, twisted us into nostalgic knots.  Listen in to this beauty, replete with Arthur’s multi-tracked harmonies, below the song lyrics.  And then check out a live-from-the-road version of the song.

“There’s nothing to do in the Midwest but dream
Like spiders on the walls of abandoned factories
Setting fire to the trash, dance beneath the fog
When the cops come we run like hell
Stealing from our souls born cheap out here
A dream that can’t compete up against the fear
Of never getting away
And there’s nothing to do in the Midwest but dream

There’s nothing to do in the Midwest but dream
Into the earth and out of the past
We plug in our guitars and begin to feed off the spirits in the air
Flying in our minds, the sound we try to hear
Is so many years from ever being defined
But there’s nothing to do in the Midwest but dream
But dream”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3IFFEH1lgw&feature=player_embedded#at=56

And also check out the recently released official video for Love Never Asks You to Lie, and then go buy The Graduation Ceremony at the banner down below the video.

“November twelfth and it is a nice night to pretend
That nothing will come at me like you did again
I could see it in your eyes and felt it in your touch
That you were as close to the truth as anything ever was

Heard you cry
Love never asks you to lie
Take off your evil disguise
I could see clear through your eyes

Western Union, Cadillacs, bankers and ice cream
Breaking windows, singing spirituals, ring like memories
At the graduation ceremony, setting our sights free
There is never gonna be another you and me

Heard you cry
Love never asks you to lie
Take off your evil disguise
I could see clear through your eyes

And they say it’s gonna shoot you
Shoot you down
When you walk around the corner
Of this ghost town
You know, they say it’s gonna shoot you
Shoot you down

Heard you cry
Love never asks you to lie
Take off your evil disguise
I could see clear through your eyes

Heard you cry
Love never asks you to lie
Take off your evil disguise
I could see clear through your eyes”

Gardens & Villa returned from the road to the welcoming arms of its loyal fans as headliners at Soho on Wednesday night, and delighted the sold-out audience with an energetic tribal-synth-pop extravaganza that was capped off by their rousing finale encore of Gary Numan’s 1979 uber-hit, Cars. The band will continue on tour in support of their new eponymous debut album on Secretly Canandian, which was produced by one of our favorite producers, Richard Swift (Damien Jurado, Mynabirds).

But for us the evening primarily revolved around Portland’s Hosannas and their musical magical realism tour.  We have been huge fans of this band since we first saw them at Muddy Waters and haven’t missed any of their Santa Barbara shows since.  They made our Best of 2010 lists in albums, songs and concerts, and we have written much about them on these pages.  The last two times they played here the band had been stripped down to the Brothers Laws in duo format, and while their songs and talent won out each time, we definitely missed the full band stylee of their first show here.  So we were greatly anticipating their opening slot at Soho on Wednesday, and the band did not disappoint.

The Soho floor was barely occupied when Hosannas began their set, but it wasn’t long before it was packed with a crowd intrigued to know who or what was making such stirring sounds.  With their off-center but stunning melodies, unique four-part harmony vocals, Brandon’s slashing guitar, Richard’s Zombies-updated keyboards, and the more majestic sound supplied by the additional members (Richard told us they had only played together for a scant six days!), Hosannas enthralled their fans and deservingly won many new converts this evening.  They opened with a great re-working of one of last year’s Best Songs of 2010, When We Were Young, and moved through other great songs such as People I Know and Onward With Bravery. Our only complaint was the brevity of the set, but acknowledge the opening-band limits.  Look for this band to make big musical waves in the years to come.

Hosannas will end this mini-tour with a show in Portland this Sunday and then head back into the studio with John Askew.  We can’t wait to hear the results.

In the meantime, the band was recently captured at Violitionist performing three songs, including Onward With Bravery, which you can check out below.

While in recovery this morning from an arresting night of live music (primarily as a result of Portland’s bound-to-triumph, full-band Hosannas, but also the returning local-heroes Gardens & Villa), we came across a perfect palliative courtesy of Pitchfork and 4AD. Check out  Iron and Wine performing on a recent 4AD Session below. Actually, it’s “just” leader Sam Beam (not the full band) performing five songs solo, which should appeal to those of you who prefer the earlier Iron and Wine 1.0 release (no doubt the same sort of crowd that would have booed the electric Dylan at Newport in ’65) as opposed to the 2.0 version that was heard on their most recent album, Kiss Each Other Clean, and featured on tour in support of that album.  As usual, Sam wins you over.  We were mainly left coveting sleep, a nylon-stringed guitar and a beard (literally; no wise-cracks), not necessarily in that order.

It’s been entirely too long since we had the fortune to catch the Avett Brothers live (Arlington, 2010).  A great vignette is provided below, courtesy of the CMT channel, which will feature the Avetts on tonight’s “Unplugged” show.  Check the Avetts performing Laundry Room off of last year’s luminary “I and Love and You.”

Ya gotta love these lines:

“Last night I dreamt the whole night long, I woke with a head full of songs
I spent the whole day, I wrote ‘em down, but it’s a shame
Tonight I’ll burn the lyrics, ’cause every chorus was your name.”