When it rains it pours in Montreal. And it’s been pouring Of Montreal all over the airwaves recently following the release last month of their great new album Lousy With Sylvanbriar.  They’ve been making magic at the left-of-the-dial (dials–remember those?) radio stations the past week, including now on 89.3 The Current in Minnesota.  Watch below as Of Montreal performs Hegira Emigre for The Current.

We love the effortless rockabilly/juke-joint guitar play of Bennet Lewis, and Kevin Barnes’ Dylan-esque vocals on this outing.  About Hegira Emigre, Barnes recently told Under The Radar the following:

“That song was kind of inspired by “Tombstone Blues” from Highway 61 Revisited, with a verse and a chorus and a verse and a chorus and a verse and chorus, and there are more than you expected there to be. I didn’t go as far as Dylan and have, like, eight verses. That was my take on that. It’s cool because Kishi Bashi plays on it at the end, because he did a lot on Paralytic Stalks, so I feel like he helped create what’s cool about that album. A lot of it is what he did, so it’s cool to get him involved on this, because it’s a completely different kind of record stylistically. That was a really fast one to do, too. We only did a couple of versions of it. Highway 61 Revisited is definitely a big influence. That record feels really spontaneous, and they probably only did a handful of takes, and it’s all about the guys in the room playing well together.”

Check it out below, and listen to the rest of The Current session HERE.

Following on the heels of her performance of the song on Wednesday on Conan (see below), M.I.A. has now released her official video for Y.A.L.A. off of new album Matangi.  The video is a visual phantasmagoria of singer close-ups and glow-in-the-dark flashings.  Amongst a lot to like in this song and inventive video:  the song simply rocks; girl goes against the grain and keeps her clothes on; and girl’s not afraid to get in society’s face.

The video (commissioned by Brit fashion publication i-D with the fashion line Kenzo) was directed by David Sannwald, and the song was produced by the Partysquad.

Check it below.

Last night the omnipresent refresh M.I.A. lit up the Conan stage with her performance of song Y.A.L.A. from her new album Matangi.  Watch below as the Brit-Sri Lankan singer/rapper performed beguilingly while basking in Indo-Asian surroundings. Y.A.L.A. takes off on the ubiquitous Y.O.L.O., ultimately pointing out that not much changes despite the catch-phrase.  And she rocks it.

Lost in all the recent hubbub is the fact that in early October Athens, GA’s Of Montreal released their 12th studio album entitled Lousy With Sylvianbriar that is a superb return to form.  Leader Kevin Barnes is never afraid to take chances and scads of stylistic turns, and along the way the last couple Of Montreal albums just didn’t strike our fancy.   Lousy With Sylvianbriar has changed all that and is now stuck on repeat at Chez Lefort, and we just can’t get enough.  Of Montreal recently checked in at KCRW and performed our favorite song off the new album, She Ain’t Speakin’ Now.  We’ll have more about the entire album later, but in the interim watch/listen below to Barnes‘ great vocal meld of Dylan, Bowie and T-Rex’s Marc Bolan on the song, not to mention the sweet harmonizing with his bandmate Rebecca Cash.  Barnes had the following to say about the song in the Track-by-Track article Under The Radar did for the album:

“She Ain’t Speakin’ Now”

Kevin Barnes: I came back from San Francisco, and my wife Nina and my daughter were both really sick. They both had this terrible flu. Nina came out to visit me for a weekend, and she had the misfortune of sitting next to this woman that was terribly sick and had no business flying. She was coughing and sneezing and leaving dirty tissues all over the place. She was really a monster in a way. But [Nina] got really ill, and it’s always scary, with people dying of the flu and all the different mutations that happen. There’s always that fear of a flu pandemic, and you never know when someone gets sick and bedridden if this is going to be the thing that actually kills someone. It’s a serious thing. So when I wrote that song, they were both really sick. I had this sense that they weren’t going to die, but I allowed myself to go to that really dark place, like “What if they did die?” That one, the verses are really beautiful, with Bennett [Lewis]’s mandolin, and I was playing this nylon-string guitar, and JoJo [Glidewell] was playing a really beautiful piano part. I like it a lot because it feels so different from verse to chorus. The verses feel more dreamy and beautiful, and the chorus is more frantic and fuzzy and rocking. I like the way the harmonies sound with me and Rebecca [Cash] on the choruses. That one was something I was thinking could be a good single.

Check out the performance below and watch or listen to the full KCRW session HERE.

The band is out on tour in support of the album (we of course missed this week’s show at Largo in LA) and will play UCSB’s Hub on January 24th.  All tour dates can be found HERE.

Nothing is ever simple and straightforward when it comes to one of our all-time favorite artists, Mr. Indie Smartypants–Stephen Malkmus.  Pavement’s leader has delighted and confounded for decades now.  Yet another example of this conjunction can be assayed (yes, we are baiting Mr. Scrabble) below in Malkmus’ (and his Jicks’) new “lyric video” for new song Lariat (off of new album Wig Out At Jagbags, to be released in early January).  As you can see below, the song’s lyrics are in French (bien sur!) as pantomimed by a femme (and cohorts) filmed in some European city.   It’s all a titch perplexing.  But what the video and its’ high-jinx cannot mask is that Lariat is one of the best songs we have heard from Malmus & The Jicks in quite some time.  It’s a great return to form after some jagged, more-experimental, prog-y excursions, and bodes well for the new album (says we song-centric citizens).

About the new album, Malkmus has semaphored: “Wig Out At Jagbags is inspired by Cologne, Germany, Mark Von Schlegell, Rosemarie Trockel, Von Spar and Jan Lankisch, Can and Gas; Stephen-Malkmus-imagined Weezer/Chili Peppers, Sic Alps, UVA in the late 80’s, NYRB, Aroma Charlottenburg, inactivity, Jamming, Indie guys trying to sound Memphis, Flipper, Pete Townshend, Pavement, The Joggers, The NBA and home life in the 2010’s …”  Below is the tracklisting from the album, which is available for pre-order HERE and HERE.

Track listing:
1. Planetary Motion
2. The Janitor Revealed
3. Lariat
4. Houston Hades
5. Shibboleth
6. J Smoov
7. Rumble At The Rainbo
8. Chartjunk
9. Independence Street
10. Scattegories
11. Cinnamon and Lesbians
12. Surreal Teenagers

Okkervil River leader Will Sheff showed up on CBS This Morning and performed (unplugged) two songs from Okkervil River’s stupendous recent album The Silver Gymnasium, which will appear somewhere in our Top Five Best Albums of 2013.  Watch below as Sheff performs Down Down The Deep River and Black Nemo.

Cincinnati’s Ass Ponys took over our lives for a period in the mid ’90s with their album The Known Universe.  It’s what separated us from the known.  The details of the Ass Pony’s universe pulverized our perception of our small world.  Listen below to the album in its entirety, and be mesmerized.  The band managed to meld the best of REM, Husker Du and The Replacements and still make a sound all their own and fill it with inventive lyrical tales and nuances.  Others may prefer other of their albums, but The Known Universe is one of the few albums that spoke to us from start to finish.

Unfortunately the band went on hiatus in 2005 and hasn’t really been heard from since.  No website, no nuttin’.  But for a time, they were known well by us.

The album’s tracklist is as follows:

1. Shoe Money 0:00
2. Under Cedars and Stars 3:12
3. God Tells Me To 5:57
4. Blow Oskar 9:16
5. Cancer Show 12:06
6. Dead Fly the Birds 15:28
7. And She Drowned 19:19
8. Redway 22:10
9. French Muscleman 25:09
10. It’s Summer Here 27:03
11. John Boat 29:55
12. Hagged 32:26
13. Some Kind of Fun 35:19

In the aftermath of Lou Reed’s passing, many good memories have floated by.  One such memory is catching the Cowboy Junkies in the late ’80s in Berkeley as they gave a hazy, lazy, but ultimately triumphant, reading of The Velvet Underground’s Sweet Jane.  A more perfect match of song and band is hard to imagine. Lou Reed himself described the Cowboy Junkies cover as “the best and most authentic version I have ever heard.”  Check out a new, visually-superb rendering by the Junkies below (as exquisitely captured in the house concert television series “the neighbors dog“–straight outta Saskatchewan).  After, check out a 1989 performance by the band on the Johnny Carson Show.

While watching the latest video, watch for the boat pulling away from the shore, crossing to the other side.  RIP Sweet Lou.

The talented (and, sure, conflagrant) M.I.A. is out on the circuits in support of new album Matangi (critically-acclaimed, except for a couple of carping cranks).  The  London-born singer/rapper showed up on Fallon last night to perform Come Walk With Me with a rare (for her) backing by a live band (The Roots and couple extra singers).  Check it out below, and watch as the troupe gets their tribal on.  Like previous efforts, it’s a grower.

In the current musician-funding malaise, one of our long-time favorite singer-songwriters Eef Barzelay (Clem Snide) has found it necessary to write songs for folks for $200 cash money, per song.  As Barzelay explained to Esquire: “To achieve sustained profitability in the music business is really almost impossible at this point, as far as I can tell,” Barzelay said. “So for me it is satisfying because I like to write songs and whenever I’m in a real pinch for money I offer it up to my people and they go for it.”  Barzelay has apparently written 157 of these personalized songs.

Esquire thus asked him to write a song on the topic of “what it means to be a man,” and 48-hours later Barzelay sent back the clever song below entitled The Ballad of a Man.  Listen (replete with tape-recorder clicks) as Barzelay skewers a dissatisfied, covetous paramour.  People, you can’t have it all.