We love the detached delivery of singer-songwriter Jessica Lea Mayfield.  Despite her stoic but simmering stance in song, there’s always a line or a look that gives her away.  Take, for example, her song Sometimes at Night in which she opens with these lines: “I broke the little cabana boy’s heart, to let you fondle me in the dark; one of those city outdoor motels, in your bed swore I never would tell.”  She’s got a bit of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler in her.  Song noir, if you will.

And now Mayfield’s done it again.  A new video has been released of her singing a new song entitled Do I Have The Time To Do The Things I Wanna Do When You’re Away?  The song’s title gives the impression it’s by a woman anxious for a break from her lover.  But you quickly surmise that instead the song is from the perspective of a woman obsessing over that lover and demanding to know where she stands in the relationship (“So if you don’t see what you need in me, then let me go/know”).  And then after a few strums too many, out-of-the-blue Mayfield let’s the other shoe drop:  “Let me know, so I can let this chair beneath me go.”  It’s unnerving stuff, made more so by Mayfield’s placid, but world-weary, delivery.  Long live Jessica Lea Mayfield.

We have been repeatedly bowled over by Seattle rapper Macklemore and his cohort Ryan Lewis.  When watching them, you can frequently get whipsawed between the heavy pathos of one song that’s followed immediately by the lifting bathos of the next song.  As witnessed below, this flip-flop happened literally on their first two songs for NPR’s latest Tiny Desk Concert.  Suffice it to say, the lads (particularly Macklemore) wear their hearts on their sleeves.  And yet those hearts seem bigger than the Kingdome.  Oh, and that first song, Same Love?  We completely support that message.  Love IS the only answer.

The Alt-J lads from Leeds were introduced to us by a savvy lass (thanks again H) long before they blew up big and their album An Awesome Wave won this year’s Mercury Prize (as best UK album of the year–no small feat).  Buoyed by the Mercury Prize, the gents (Joe Newman on lead vocals and guitar, Thom Green on drums, Gwil Sainsbury on guitar and bass, and Gus Unger-Hamilton on keyboards) seem to have the world sewn up (so to speak), as you can see below as they perform Matilda in an NYC button shop (Just Buttons–the missing Seinfeld episode?).  We’re suckers for bands who use kiddy xylophones.  Wrap it up and put it under the Christmas Twee.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS_x25knS0w&feature=em-uploademail

For many (guilty) REM ruled their musical hearts and minds for an era.  We first caught them opening for Gang of Four at the Adams Theater in San Diego on 9-11-1982 (and later would accidentally–but thankfully–follow their tour across the south to California in September 1986), and would see them countless times thereafter.  At the Adams Theater in 1982, despite Michael Stipe having a broken leg and being rendered stool-bound (until he just couldn’t help himself), and a subsequent damaging and marching angular-guitar set from Gang of Four, we knew that REM would go on to be a force in music, and a great live band.  Their performances of the likes of Radio Free Europe and Catapult were all it took to suck us in forever.  Between Stipe’s vocals and manic energy, Peter Buck’s jangle-attack, and Mills and Buckner’s rousing rhythm section and vocal contributions (not to mention some of the best songs written), they were a stunningly great admix.

Newly-released (at least on YouTube) concert footage of the band performing in February 1981 gives a great feel for the early energy and alchemical cohesion of the band.  The video opens with Buddy Holly’s Rave On with Stipe doing his best Elvis Presley imitation (which he would fall into intermittently during the set).  A great historical vignette.   If nothing else, to get a feel for early Stipe and band, watch one minute from 11:00-12:00.  To be young….  Enjoy.

Below are set’s songs and times:

00:00 (cuts in) Rave On
01:37 Burning Down
05:43 Dangerous Times
08:17 All the Right Friends
13:00 Get on Their Way
15:54 Different Girl
19:25 Permanent Vacation
21:44 White Tornado
23:53 Narrator
27:00 Wind Out
28:45 Gardening at Night
32:36 Mystery to Me
34:36 Radio Free Europe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RiZW_Wlj8Kw

As we’ve repeatedly touted, one of the best albums of 2012 is A.C. Newman’s Shut Down the Streets.  Now comes his retro (early ’70s talk-show) video for I’m Not Talking featuring the “tearing-up host” trope.  Check it and go buy this album.

We hadn’t heard about ’em until just before we wrote about upstart Brit-band Palma Violets yesterday, and then last night they appeared on Later With Jools Holland.  Suddenly, they’re everywhere.  Check ’em out below slayin’ on their song Tom the Drum (followed by Last of the Summer Wine).  Dem boys gots it!

Honestly, we were not until this week acquainted with Brit singer-songwriter Martin Harley, nor had we heard him play slide guitar.  But then we caught him performing his song Cardboard King off of his latest album, Mojo Fix, and we were transfixed.  And on this rainy day, that song (and the others after) meshes perfectly.  While some of Harley’s material violates our anti-blues bias (been there, heard that), he wears it very well.  Check Harley out below courtesy of Portland’s KINK Radio at the Bing Lounge. Oh, and had World Party not cancelled their Thursday night gig at Soho because of illness, we would have caught him opening for them on their tour.  Dang.