Finally, Radiohead has put up on YouTube their stunningly rendered From the Basement performance of their album of the year, “The King of Limbs” (plus songs Staircase and The Daily Mail).  If there were any doubts as to the best live band on the planet, they’ve been put to rest.  Check it out soon, as it will be available for a limited time only.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=192MiKNk03c

Check out Bon Iver’s official video for their hopeful but helpless song Holocene, one of our top songs of the 2011. Director Nabil Elderkin fittingly filmed the video in Iceland.  Blow it up big while viewing.  There will be magnificence in our insignificance.

Band leader/songwriter Justin Vernon has said this about the song:  “Holocene is a bar in Portland, Ore., but it’s also the name of a geologic era, an epoch if you will. It’s a good example of how all the songs are all meant to come together as this idea that places are times and people are places and times are… people?  They can all be different and the same at the same time. Most of our lives feel like these epochs. That’s kind of what that song’s about. “Once I knew I was not magnificent.” Our lives feel like these epochs, but really we are dust in the wind. But I think there’s a significance in that insignificance that I was trying to look at in that song.”

BON IVER “Holocene” from nabil elderkin on Vimeo.

Many/most of you have seen videos of the great trials bike rider Danny Macaskill doing his crazy tricks.  Just last week a new video was released featuring Macaskill doing his crazy thing in the Scottish countryside with the song, The Wolves, by Ben Howard as soundtrack. Ya gotta love the rope and railroad tricks.  The Wolves will be featured in Howard’s first album, “Every Kingdom” to be released in October.  This video will undoubtedly skyrocket Howard’s musical career.

Check out the new Macaskill video and, in case you’re one of the few on the planet that hasn’t seen it, below that check out Macaskill’s video that put him on the map featuring the Band of Horses’ phenomenal song, The Funeral.

And here are the innaresting lyrics to Howard’s song.

“Falling from high places, falling through lost spaces,
Now that we’re lonely, now that there’s nowhere to go.
Watching from both sides, these clock towers burning up,
I lost my time here, i lost my patience with it all.

And we lost faith, in the arms of love.

Where you been hiding lately, where you been hiding from the news?
Because we’ve been fighting lately, we’ve been fighting with the wolves.
With the wolves.
Red tongues and hands.

Falling from high places, falling through lost spaces,
Now that we’re lonely, now that we’re so far from home.
Watching from both sides, these towers been tumbling down,
I lost my mind here, I lost my patience with the lord.

And we lost faith, oh in the arms of love

Where you been hiding lately, where you been hiding from the news?
Because we’ve been fighting lately, we’ve been fighting with the wolves.
With the wolves.
Red tongues and hands.

We lost faith, in the arms of love.”

We unearthed yet another performance pocket.  And we figured out where former KCRW maestro, Nic Harcourt, has alighted post-KCRW.  Both can be found At: Guitar Center.  Harcourt puts out podcasts from these sessions and various videos are archived.  Nothing too cutting edge, but some compelling performances nonetheless.

Check out Guitar Center sessions by Daniel Lanois and Black Dub, Peter Gabriel and Jane’s Addiction.

These days there are powerful performances pocketed within the vast interstitial weave of the interweb.  One pocket that we keep reaching into and coming out gold-pieces is Radio K, the fab, student-run radio station out of the University of Minnesota.  We particularly grift to the gold to be found in Radio K’s In-Studio Performances.

Most recently, Radio K caught Montreal’s Handsome Furs delivering with palpable verve in-studio, including gratuitous laser effects.  The Furs are the married team of Dan Boeckner (formerly of the worthy Wolf Parade) on vocals and guitar and Alexei Perry on synths and beats.  We were introduced to the Handsome ones by the late, great Kenny Harbaugh (and his Sub Pop pals) in the form of the (highly recommended) 2007 record, “Plague Park.” We’ve been hooked since.  The Furs have just released a new album “Sound Kapital” on Sub Pop and recently hit Radio K in support.

Check out a couple of Radio K’s Handsome captures below, buy the new album, and then catch the un-psychedelic Furs when they came to Cali between September 1st and 4th (at the Echo Plex in LA on the 2nd and Slim’s in SF on the 3rd).  We particularly like the energy that the band brings to the In-Studio on Bury Me Standing (of course there are added loops and backing tracks that embellish the sound, but the duo compels nonetheless).  And their performance of the song What About Us? brings the question to life.  Check in particular the song-within-a-song chorus that begins at 2:43.  Come on and break our hearts indeed.    

Live on Radio K: Handsome Furs – “Bury Me Standing” from Radio K on Vimeo.

And here’s What About Us?:

Live on Radio K: Handsome Furs – “What About Us?” from Radio K on Vimeo.

NPR is now streaming the new Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks record “Mirror Traffic.”  Based on the tracks released to date and our first listen, the new record will end up high on our Top 10 of 2011 list and is a return to from by the magnificent Malkmus.  Check it out.

The Line of Best Fit has provided some great live music vignettes in the past, but our favorite is the great Mathhew Houck and Phosphorescent performing one of our favorite songs, Cocaine Lights. Check it out below.

We know some of you are heading to Outside Lands this weekend in San Francisco.  If not (yeah, that’s us), there are two festivals coming up in September to sate your music festival desires.  They’re not Glastonbury, but won’t take a 10 hour flight or involve fields of mud and rain (we hope).

First up on September 3rd is the FYF Fest at the Los Angeles State Historic Park in downtown L.A.  Check out the lineup, the highlights of which for us will be Guided by Voices, Broken Social Scene, Girls, The Weakerthans, Explosions in the Sky and Cass McCombs.

And then of course there’s the free three-day Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco from September 30th to October 2nd.  We attended last year and were enthralled despite the crowds (owing solely to the guidance of HSB veterans’ voices–thanks John!).  This year’s lineup (with more to be added) looks even better than last year.  Amongst countless others scheduled to perform:  Elbow(!!!!!),  Bright Eyes, Broken Social Scene, The Felice Brothers, M. Ward, John Prine, Emmylou Harris, Kris Kristofferson with Merle Haggard, Gomez, Robyn Hitchcock, Gillian Welch, Over the Rhine and Justin Townes Earle (with his estranged father, Steve Earle, performing separately).  It’s an embarrassment of riches, and it’s free.  Did we mention free?  Be there.

We don’t like to repeat much.  But the Dawes performance of Time Spent in Los Angeles was repeated two nights ago.  And we repeat, don’t miss their show at Soho with Blitzen Trapper on October 8th.  Tickets are on sale now at Club Mercy. In the meantime, check out Dawes on Letterman.

Cage the Elephant has been unleashing its music and garnering rapturous praise (their set at this year’s KJEE Summer-Roundup at the Santa Barbara Bowl was highly lauded) following the release of its most recent album, “Thank You, Happy Birthday.”  And recently they’ve been breaking out at the Big L’s:  Leno and Lollapalooza.

To help try and burn through this gray weather malaise, check out singer Mathhew Shultz below channeling Cobain vocally and the band paying homage in Aberdeen on Leno last night (while also sprinkling a pinch of the Pixies’ dust).  And below that watch the band performing the touching Shake Me Down done sing-a-long stylee at Lollapalooza in the rain (during the chorus you can hear all those Glastonbury crowds’ singing lessons finally seeming to yield sing-a-long benefits at the other festivals).  “Even on a cloudy day” indeed.

Here’s Shake Me Down:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIStRqQu7pA&feature=player_embedded