As everyone knows, Jimmy Fallon and crew have great taste in music, and last night Fallon was in music-geek heaven when the great Jack White lit up the stage on The Tonight Show.  White and band first played the rootsy Just One Drink as a web-exclusive, and then rendered an incendiary take on the title track of White’s new album, Lazaretto.  After bowing to White after each performance, Fallon interviewed White, focusing on the inventive, feature-laden “Ultra LP” edition of Lazaretto (watch White’s video at bottom).   You can check out the Tonight Show songs and interview below.

Anybody questioning the passion and intensity of Jack White on stage need only assay how long it takes for him to come out of his trance-like state at the end of the slashing Lazaretto.  The boy has got it.  In spades.

Jack White “Lazaretto” ~ Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight… by HumanSlinky

Someone leading the PopUp Chorus in North Carolina has recently been picking some particularly great unheralded songs for the PopUps to sing.  PopUp Chorus is held in Durham, NC by Community Chorus Project.  Check out below as first the PopUp performs Lost In The Trees’ fine Daunting Friend.  The song is off of Lost In The Trees album Past Life, a stupendously underrated album which will indubitably appear on our Best Albums of 2014 (highly recommended; full review soon come).  After the two PopUp videos, listen to Lost In The Trees studio version of the song and watch them perform it for WNRN.  Beauty.  The song’s lyrics are at bottom.

After watching the PopUps perform Daunting Friend, check out the PopUp’s well-done cover of what will undoubtedly end up as one of our Best Songs of 2104, Sylvan Esso’s Coffee.

Daunting Friend

“you’re such a daunting friend
you sing to me under your bed
a melody’s rotten
all your spirling hair
I will meet you on the stairs
the angels are speaking

so I will lie
in your shadow
out where the oceans are dark
we’ll never hunt alone
so long
out where our eyes are all older
our memories have grown

we’ll float around the town
chasing all that beauty we’re after
a mirror repeating
saying you’re alright
sing with all the color of night
our love’s always changing
like angels speaking

so I will lie
in your shadow
out where the oceans are dark
we’ll never hunt alone

and rise up
arise
light of our own
our armored moon will burn bright
and fold us in her arms

I let you slip away
you let me slip away
forever
when our eyes are all older
our memories stay”

Last night Arcade Fire brought out Ian McCulloch to cover Echo & The Bunnymen’s The Cutter at London’s Earls Court.  Tonight they returned at the venue and covered The Smiths’ London with brother Butler (Will) on lead vocals.  Listen to it below.  Tonight’s set list is at bottom.

We’ve been huge fans of Echo & the Bunnymen since we wore out Crocodiles in 1980.  Imagine our delight then to discover that last night at Earls Court in London, Arcade Fire did this above (photo) and brought out Echo & The Bunnymen’s leader Ian McCulloch for a resounding cover of Echo & the Bunnymen’s 1983 hit The Cutter.  Watch below.  Echo & the Bunnymen are coming to the Observatory in Santa Ana on July 30th courtesy of Club Mercy.

Arcade Fire plays the Santa Barbara Bowl on August 4th and we can’t wait to see if they can top The National and Elbow for the best show of 2014.  Be there.

To get a great feel for the band live, Arcade Fire tweeted earlier today that tonight’s last UK show at Earls Court will be broadcast audio live on XFM London radio.  Lorde (who also plays the Santa  Barbara Bowl on October 9th) will open tonight from 7:00-7:45 pm UK time (11-11:45am Pacific time) and Arcade Fire’s set is from 8:20-10pm (12:20-2pm Pacific).  US and other non-UK folks need to use postcode SW193RQ.  Go HERE and plug in the code.

We’ve now seen two great nights in a row for late night TV music. After Wednesday’s triple-header, future Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Famer Damon Albarn appeared on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon in support of his debut solo album, Everyday Robots, and sang the isolated Lonely Press Play supported by a superb big-band.  And in a web-exclusive, Albarn also sang Blur’s brilliant This Is A Low.  While both were rapturously rendered, the latter’s string embellishment behind Albarn’s affecting piano playing and vocals was on another plane. Watch both performances below.

We’ve forever been avid fans of Kevin Drew and Feist (and Broken Social Scene, from which they launched long ago).  So we were overjoyed to catch both of them in Funny Or Die’s video for Drew’s daringly good Darlings song You In Your Were.  Check it out below.  The opening bit with Drew’s pal Zach Galifianakis (the two performed together at Largo in LA in April) is hilarious.  Galifianakis plays a choreographer helping Drew with a dance in an attempt to make the song a hit and blurts out (only somewhat jokingly) that “nobody likes good music anymore.”  But of course the best part of the video is the song and the titillating interaction of Drew and the always-entrancing Leslie Feist.  This is your cue people:  watch the video below, and then prove Galifianakis wrong by buying and liking the “good music” of Kevin Drew on Darlings.  Go buy it HERE.

‘Twas a busy music night on the late night talk shows last night.  In our order of preference, first watch Chrissie Hynde (the “coolest human being alive” according to Jimmy Fallon; we would add “alluring”) on The Tonight Show backed by The Roots performing Dark Sunglasses and then You or No One (the latter a web exclusive) off of her impending new album Stockholm. Then watch watch Bob Mould (with the hilarious and talented drummer Jon Wurster) rip through a raging performance of I Don’t Know You Anymore off his new album Beauty & Ruin.  Then watch Dave Letterman get “excited” about the Afghan Wigs performance (their first on his show since 1996) of Matamoros off their new album Do The Beast.   Another Dave rave.  We’re still recovering from Dave’s hyperbole about that disturbing Future Islands performance (we suspect that the other music media sites missed Dave’s sarcasm).

The Antlers, are set to release their next album Familiars on June 16th in the UK (via Transgressive) and June 17th in the U.S. (via Anti-).  It’s the band’s first album since 2011′s brilliant Burst Apart. We’ve already been graced by The Antlers song and video Palace. A month ago we heard new song Hotel, and the band has now released the song’s official video (via Pitchfork), featuring atmospheric vignettes to go with the harrowing horns.  You can pre-order the new album, one of our most highly anticipated albums of 2014, HERE.

The band heads out on its North American and European tour later this month.  Check the dates at bottom.

The Antlers:

6/17 Brooklyn, NY – Rough Trade
6/25 Cambridge, MA – The Sinclair ^
6/26 Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer ^
6/28 Columbus, OH – A&R Music Bar *
6/27 Toronto, Ontario – The Mod Club *
6/28 Columbus, OH – A&R Music Bar *
6/29 Chicago, IL – Lincoln Hall *
7/01 Minneapolis, MN – Triple Rock Social Club *
7/02 Kansas City, MO – The Riot Room *
7/03 Denver, CO – Bluebird Theater *
7/05 Salt Lake City, UT – Urban Lounge *
7/07 Spokane, WA – The Bartlett *
7/08 Vancouver, British Columbia – VENUE *
7/09 Seattle, WA – Neumos *
7/11 San Francisco, CA – Great American Music Hall *
7/12-13 Los Angeles, CA – Troubadour *
7/16 Solana Beach, CA – Belly Up Tavern #
7/17 Phoenix, AZ – The Crescent Ballroom #
7/19 Dallas, TX – Trees #
7/20 Austin, TX – The Parish #
7/21 Houston, TX – Fitzgerald’s #
7/23 Atlanta, GA – Masquerade #
7/24 Raleigh, NC – Kings #
7/25 Washington, D.C. – 9:30 Club #
7/26 New York, NY – Webster Hall #
8/17 Portland, OR – MusicFest NW
10/01 Brussels, Belgium – AB Club
10/03 Amsterdam, Netherlands – PARADISO
10/04 Cologne, Germany – Gebaude 9
10/06 Copenhagen, Denmark – Vega
10/07 Oslo, Norway – Rockefeller
10/09 Stockholm, Sweden – Debaser Strand
10/10 Gothenburg, Sweden – Pustervik
10/11 Aarhus, Denmark – Voxhall
10/12 Hamburg, Germany – Knust
10/14 Berlin, Germany – Lido
10/15 Prague, Czech Republic – Lucerna Music Bar
10/16 Vienna, Austria – Flex
10/18 Zurich, Switzerland – Komplex
10/19 Fribourg, Switzerland – Fri-Son
10/20 Paris, France – Café de la Danse
10/22 Brighton, England – Old Market
10/23 Birmingham, England – Oobleck
10/24 London, England – Hackney Empire
10/27 Bristol, England – Trinity
10/30 Dublin, Ireland – Olympia
11/01 Glasgow, Scotland – Oran Mor
11/02 Leeds, England – Belgrave Music Hall

^ with Mr. Twin Sister
* with Yellow Ostrich
# with THUS OWLS

As an antidote to this morning’s mournful ramblings about Isla Vista and Hurray for the Riff Raff’s St. Roch Blues, we offer up flipside solace in the uplift of three songs by the great Brooklyn band Woods.

We were first won over by the jangle-psych-pop of Woods in 2010. It seems like just yesterday that Woods came out and stole the Jensens Backstage from much-loved hipsters Kurt Vile and Real Estate, in retrospect one of the best triple-bills ever pulled together in recent Santa Barbara (thanks, again, to Club Mercy!).  Woods was further emblazoned in our ears with their superb set at the 2011 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.  Then in 2012 the band released one of our favorite songs of all of 2012, Cali In A Cup , which featured three of our favorite things:  California, a cup (we assume glass?) and some musical sunshine.

In April Woods released their latest album, With Light And With Love, to deserved critical acclaim (even the Pitchforkers gave the album a 7.9 rating).  Now comes the news that Woods will release on July 8th release a new 7″ single that includes two non-album tracks, Tambourine Light and Tomorrow’s Only Yesterday.  Listen below to the sanguine Tambourine Light, followed by two superb songs off of With Light and With Love, and go buy the single HERE and the latest album HERE.  These are sunny, warming songs we hope will bring you back into the light.

Woods will begin a new tour soon and is coming to Cali in August.

“Bullets are flying from a young man’s hands.  People are dying, and no one understands.  And I keep on crying.”

Been twelve days since that Isla Vista Friday when the world got taken to its knees by a young madman.  Again.  The randomness of the events adds to the misery, with no rhyme or reason to explain the death of the innocents and what was left of the innocence.

Since that damnation day, we’ve had Hurray for the Riff Raff’s St. Roch Blues on repeat at Chez Lefort.  If there’s a more fitting song to sum up the aftermath of that Isla Vista night, we’re all ears.  Watch ’em and weep with the doo-wop below as the video cuts between the band and the song-inspiring St. Roch neighborhood (in which a series of murders occurred in 2011) in the band’s hometown of New Orleans.  The song’s lyrics are at bottom.

Once again we’re late to find Hurray for the Riff Raff, only discovering them earlier this year.  Singer-songwriter Alynda Lee Segarra and band have been receiving deserved praise for their recent roots album Small Town Heroes, and St. Roch Blues is just a taste of this enthralling “new” artist.

We’ll have more on this band and their great album later, but we’ve got a song to listen to again.  We’ve got the Isla Vista blues.  Be better world.

There must be somewhere in this whole world
There must be somewhere in this whole world
Cause I keep on trying
I keep on trying
Bullets are flying from a young man’s hands
People are dying, no one understands
And I keep on crying
I keep on crying
Baby please don’t go down to New Orleans
Cause you don’t know the things I seen
Bullets are flying
Bullets are flying
I got the St Roch blues down in my soul
I’ve seen so many of my good friends go
And it’s won’t be long til I go
It won’t be long til I go