OK, this seals it.  We’ve seen the brash Brit-band Palma Violets perform live in various video formats and on late night shows, but never in person.  And we’ve heard from trustworthy sources about the band’s manic shows. Now comes the band’s new video for Rattlesnake Highway (off their acclaimed debut album 180), and we hereby commit to not missing their next show within our concert realm. Watch below as the band is rapturously captured live in fan videos, interspersed (for some reason) with shots of snake worshipers.  Catch them out on tour soon.  They return to Cali in two week (including at the El Rey in LA on 10/19).  The band’s current tour dates can be found HERE.

One of our favorites, Elbow, came across the Pond in 2011 to play the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco (happening again this coming weekend).  For those in attendance, it was one of the most magnificent, heartwarming performances of that or any other year.  You simply must see this band live.  Get it on your bucket list now.

We were thrilled yesterday when Elbow announced on their website both the release of a new concert recording/DVD entitled Live at Jodrell Bank, and the release next March of its 6th studio album (tentatively titled All At Once), with touring to begin shortly thereafter in the UK .  With respect to the Live release, approximately 12,000 people watched Elbow’s performance near the Lovell radio telescope.  You see, Elbow frontman Guy Garvey is an amateur astronomer, and the event also featured speeches from over 80 scientists.

About the impending new studio album, Garvey said this about the working title of the album:  “”When you’re 40, you’re all ages at once, because you’re thinking of your youth, which has very definitely passed, and about how you became the person you are. You wonder about how the rest of your life plays out from here.”

Today, Elbow released an excellent excerpted performance from the new Live at Jodrell Bank DVD of the much-loved Grounds For Divorce.  Watch below and be wowed.

Moby showed up on Conan last night in support of his new album Innocents.  In Black Flag shirt, Moby brought a huge entourage in his now-standard all-white attire, including devastatingly-great singer-songwriter Damien Jurado. Check out below as the group performs The Perfect Life (sans, but a la, Wayne Coyne), and then (in a web-exclusive) Almost Home, with Jurado hurling his dulcet-distinctive vocals into the song.  On the song’s chorus, the troupe segues into a mass singalong that sounds akin to, but dares to dwarf, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon.  That’s beauty right there.  Bravo!  Moby begins a mini-tour tomorrow night, playing the Henry Fonda Theater three nights in a row.

The astonishingly-talented Amanda Palmer seems to live at the extreme ends of the pathos-to-bathos spectrum, and less so in between. On one song Palmer’s effortlessly inducing heartfelt tears, and on the next she’s got you in tears of joy.  Falling into the latter category, watch below as Palmer and her popular author and husband Neil Gaiman collaborated last year in Seattle on a cute cover of the old standard, Makin’ Whoopee (and we ain’t talkin’ Goldberg).  Ya gotta love the sly spousal interplay.