We won’t shut up about this band.  Having seen Elbow recently at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, our praise-ante has only been upped.  Check out Guy and guys perform the piano hymn, The River, off of this year’s “Build a Rocket Boys” album.  A confessional beauty.

“I walked with the river in kind of a dream
Hand in hand, the all-knowing river and me
To the clammer of rushes and deeply barren trees
A drunk making blossom, the blush to be seen

I told him my sorrows and broken-down dreams
Confessed every lie, replayed every scene
He openly wept as he listened to me
And then, with the sun in the west, he showed me the sea”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F87D6hE9mdw

St. Vincent showed on Jimmy Fallon’s Show to perform a cover of post-punk band, The Pop Group’s “She Is Beyond Good and Evil.”  And so we have additional respect for St. Vincent and Annie Clark. As we have seen before in her selection of other heavy covers, St. Vincent doesn’t mind taking risks and casting off serious avant-garde racket on guitar. There’s no sweetness in this performance below, thankfully, just intensity and art. Check it out below.

There are seemingly endless bantam-male Swedish singer-songwriters from which to choose.  To help narrow it down: forgot all about that Tallest Dylan Impersonator option.  Instead our top choice is Jens Lekman, thank you very much, over all the rest of the mini-Swedes.  Check out Lekman on the very appropriately titled NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert below. As NPR puts it: If you’re suffering from a broken heart, Jens Lekman is here to remind you that there are more important things to worry about. Like, say, the end of the world.” Check out Lekman’s interesting banter and the following songs: I Want A Pair Of Cowboy Boots; The End Of The World Is Bigger Than Love; and Waiting For Kirsten.

Check out Tom Waits’ official video for his song Satisfied off of his career-crowning “Bad as Me” album.  This could be your idea of heaven or hell.  As always, we’re leaning heaven.  It done gots gobs of glitter AND doom, but Keef is sorely missing.  Check it.

Swedish sister duet, First Aid Kit, played KCRW recently.  Check out below their charming homage to The Real Country music, Emmylou, and its stalwarts, Emmylou Harris, June Carter Cash, Gram Parsons and Johnny Cash.  The song and performance evince great taste and talent, and a kinship to the touted touchstones.  If you’re in LA tonight, First Aid Kit plays the Troubadour.

Once again, lots of Santa Barbara music-lovers were AWOL on Sunday when the Fruit Bats and Parson Red Heads put on one of the best shows Santa Barbara has seen this year (saying much) courtesy of Club Mercy and the New Noise Festival.  As anticipated, the Fruit Bats brought their high-energy, pop-melodic phantasmagoria to Soho, and the appreciative (albeit diminutive) crowd went batty.  Those in doubt before the show are now doubtless.  The Fruit Bats are one of America’s best live bands and Chicago-based songwriter/leader, Eric Johnson, continues to add to his burgeoning song-chest as one of America’s premier new-generation singer-songwriters (along with Taylor Goldsmith from Dawes, Jim James, the National boys, Conor Oberst and a few select others).

You have simply got to catch this band live.  Passion and precision rarely coincide, but Eric Johnson and the Fruit Bats provide exactly that.  At Soho there were pop stars converging.  The first part of the band’s set consisted mostly of songs off of their worthy new album, “Tripper” (more on this new concept album another time), including You’re Too Weird, Tony The Tripper, Tangie and Ray, and Heart Like an Orange. Johnson then alerted the crowd that the remaining songs would be “older and progressively older,” and the remaining set consisted of pop-gems predominantly from their last album, the fantastic ’70s-influenced, “The Ruminant Band” and and from “Spelled in Bones.” Highlights included Lives of Crime, (the Marshall Tucker Band-sounding) Feather Bed, (preposterously jaunty) Being on Our Own, Legs of Bees, Primitive Man, When You Love Somebody (of course; check the Soho video below), and a stunningly beautiful solo rendition by Johnson of Singing Joy To The World.  The band closed out the night with a ridiculously rousing rendition of The Ruminant Band (with some more Marshall Tucker/Allmans guitar bits).

The bottom line is that when you combine Johnson’s pop-hooky songwriting, sweet high-register voice and friendly Midwestern-mien, with the superb playing and harmony vocals of the other Bats, you can’t help but be won over.  Our faces ached from smiling after the show.

Fortunately for the slackers that missed the show, the good folks at NYCtaper recorded the Fruit Bats’ very-similar recent set at the Bowery, and you can listen/download the set HERE (if you do nothing else check out Johnson’s solo version of Singing Joy to the World). As usual, the quality by Nyctaper is high and they had this to say about the particulars: “I recorded this set with a soundboard feed provided by the Fruit Bats’ sound engineer, together with DPA microphones.   The results are, as usual with Bowery, excellent.  Enjoy!”  We did!

And below check out the band performing  When You Love Somebody at Soho (thanks to Oulalie), then My Unusual Friend and Johnson’s solo (acoustic guitar as opposed to the shimmering, reverbified electric at Soho) Singing Joy to the World, and finally, the closer: The Ruminant Band:

And then just for fun, check out Johnson channeling Neil on Young’s Revolution Blues below.

As a side note, after the show Eric Johnson hailed Club Mercy as his “favorite promoter in all of America” and commended them for the good care given to the bands.  And we (Santa Barbara and the ever-expanding beyond), are the beneficiaries.  Bravo!

And while we’re at it, make sure you support the bands out on tour and hit the merch tables as hard as you can.  Look at the sort of eye-and-ear candy you can pick up.  Well done Fruit Bats!

Opening up for the Fruit Bats were the rousing Parson Red Heads, touring in support of their new album, “Yearling.”  Yearling was produced and engineered by seminal North Carolina indie dudes, Chris Stamey and Mitch Easter (REM, etc.), respectively, and by sometimes member and producer, Raymond Richards.

The Parson Red Heads themselves are leader, Evan Way, sweet-faced redhead (and wife of Evan) Brette Marie Way on drums and vocals, tall Sam Fowles on guitar and vocals, and Charlie Hester on bass and vocals.  Visually they’re three hirsute dudes and one girl-next-door redhead gal (killing on drums).  They have a decided folk-rock sound, on several occasions directly channeling the jangle of The Byrds, albeit updated.  Ultimately their songs and breathtaking harmonizing won the crowd over.  Highlights of their set were the beauteous barbershop-quartet-esque rendering of the Beach Boys’ Surfer Girl (as pictured above and a snippet of which can be heard below) and the two closing songs (both off the new album), the rocking Kids Hanging Out and Burning Up the Sky.

Check out below a snippet of their cover of Surfer Girl at Soho (again courtesy of Oulalie), and then their live performance of new song highlight, Burning Up the Sky:

We’ve recently been stumbling upon great, previously unknown (to us) female performers (Jessica Lea Mayfield, Lydia Loveless), and it seems hardly a week goes by that we don’t get hit between the ears by another gal.  That’s all we ask:  one a week.  And it happened again this past week when we got hit by Seattle’s Shelby Earl, who has just released a brand new album entitled “Burn the Boats.” We can provide no better description of Earl’s melodious gestalt than that provided by one of our all-time favorite critics, Ann Powers (currently of NPR):  “Shelby’s [songs] recall legendary genre-busters like Patsy Cline as well as more contemporary artists like Jenny Lewis and Brandi Carlile. Everybody wants to compare her to Neko Case, maybe because of the Northwest connection, but if Neko is bourbon, Shelby is honey wine. Sweeter at first taste, her music is subtly intoxicating.”

The album was produced by the roaringly talented John Roderick (of The Long Winters), and is comprised of a bevy of stellar indie-folk-country-rock originals that much of the time seek to inspire and cajole out of complacency.  In addition to great writing and singing by Earl on the new album, she has notorious Northwest-All-Star backing by members of the Long Winters, Telekinesis, the Head and the Heart, and others.

To get a feel for Shelby Earl check out four songs off of Burn the Boats HERE, and then the videos below from her recent session on KEXP (with perfect horn and string augmentation).  And then go over and buy her album HERE. And do keep an eye on Ms. Earl.

We’ve been following the growing painlessness of Active Child for a while now.  And despite the foreshadowing of great earlier songs such as I’m In Your Church at Night and When Your Love is Safe, leader/singer/harpist Pat Rossi (part of the ever-growing falsetto coterie) appears to have fully matured with their recently released first proper album, “You Are All I See,” on Vagrant Records.  The album is more varied sonically and lyrically, and all for the better.

Rossi (former choir boy turned indie artiste) recently said this about the album: “You Are All I See is an attempt to build a bridge between the listener and I, in that, I wrote these songs for you as much as I did for me. And right now when you are listening to my voice, by yourself, it really is just you and I.”  Despite the grammar issues (yes, we are both Strunk and White), we laud Rossi’s move from the self-involved to the altruistic.  Rossi went on to say: “The songs focus primarily on the joy and heartbreak of relationships, love lost and rediscovered, battles with monogamy, battles with identity.  It came out much darker than I had intended, but sometimes you only have so much control.  I think more than anything, I see this debut release as a bridge towards something bigger and truer.”  We say:  done.

Active Child employs grand orchestral-synth elements, harpo-chamber moments, and layered choral voices, all to great effect.  But the new album also includes electronica samples and drums with R&B-ish melodic lines.  It’s a heady and hearty mix.

Before you check out some scintillating videos below, check out the album’s first single, Playing House, below (this the “Chad Valley remix with that dang vocoder opening unfortunately).  Motown or OMD, or the love-child thereof??  You make the call. Compare this version to the live version on KEXP below.

Active Child–Playing House (Chad Valley remix)

As for the videos, first check out Active Child performing Hanging On for The Line of Best Fit in Reykjavik during Iceland Airwaves 2011.  And then check the trio perform Playing House and Johnny Belinda on KEXP. And then below that check out the first song that drew us to the band, I’m in Your Church at Night, as done earlier this year on KEXP (and in a decidedly slower arrangement from the recorded version, which you can listen to below the video for comparison’s sake).  Both are stunning, but we’ll take the live version for now.

Active Child–I’m In Your Church at Night

[audio:https://www.thelefortreport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Im_In_Your_Church_At_Night.mp3|titles=Im_In_Your_Church_At_Night]

And just for completeness, check out the powerful, When Your Love is Safe, off their first EP:

Active Child–When Your Love is Safe

[audio:https://www.thelefortreport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/03-When-Your-Love-is-Safe.mp3|titles=03 When Your Love is Safe]

Lana Del Rey, newly signed to Interscope Records, performed in Manchester, England on Friday night, including a new song, Off to the Races, that you can check out below. The song is decidedly murkier than prior songs and portends variety and nuance for her first full album release anticipated in 2012.  She pseudo-raps/sings, while musically the song travels between the Middle East, Jamaica and mid-80s London, and ends up somewhere in between.

Check it.

Brooklyn band, Milagres, is rapidly gaining notoriety and rising up in the indie scene.  We particularly like lead singer and principal songwriter, Kyle Wilson’s, falsetto vocals that remind at times of Chris Martin of Coldplay and at others like a Grizzly Bear that’s taken an Elbow.  They’ve been accused (Pitchfork) of leaning too heavily on their elders and influencers, but we think the head and the heart of the band overcome, and the band’s net effect is  alluring.  Time will tell, but so far Milagres seems no mirage.

Check out two official videos from their album “Glowing Mouth” on Kill Rock Stars below, and then a few live performances by the band.  And then go buy their new album HERE.

The next video is from the band’s performance last week on LA’s 97.9 Performance Studio.  And other live vignettes follow from recent Sleepover Sessions.