Damien Rice will release his long-awaited, Rick Rubin-produced album,  My Favourite Faded Fantasy, in a couple weeks.  As a further preview, Rice has now released a great song off the new album entitled The Greatest Bastard.  We love this song, having first heard Rice deliver a heartfelt, mesmerizing performance (see above) of it a few weeks ago on Later with Jools Holland (sure, we’d show you the performance, but the bilious BBC is unwilling to allow US citizens to view it on the web).  You can at least hear the studio version below, embellished with strings.  It’s a great one that bodes incredibly well for the new album.

Photo by Faith Silva

After discovering her earlier this month, we have been trolling the interweb for word on the performances by breakout artist, Tei Shi, at the annual CMJ Music Marathon in NYC last week.  But bizarrely not much has been forthcoming.  Perhaps that’s owing to social media rumors of an ill-timed illness taking hold of Tei Shi during CMJ.

Regardless, that trolling led to more great Tei Shi discoveries.  First up below is a looped-vocals performance of the cut M&Ms as captured by Yours Truly in her producer’s house.  Girl can sing!  Great production values too.

Afterwards, check out Tei Shi’s collaboration with new band Human Heat on the latter’s slightly-Thom Yorke-inflected song Fever.  Sounds great to these ears, just like her earlier-posted collaboration with Glass Animals.

In addition, two enlightening interviews with Tei Shi can be found, one for V Magazine HERE and for The Wild Magazine HERE.

Blood Orange (Dev Hynes) made his network TV debut this week on the Jimmy Kimmel Show.  Hynes is the ensemble’s fantastic, multitalented (producer, composer, vocalist and shredding guitar player) mastermind, and he chose to add girlfriend Samantha Urbani and some dancers to deliver a rousing performance of It Is What It Is from Blood Orange’s tremendous 2013 album Cupid Deluxe.

Hynes had this to say about the performance:  “I remember making this song in my bedroom, jankily recording every single part & instrument myself as I usually do, while sitting on my bed at 4am, it’s strange and amazing what can happen in a year….” Check the performance out below.

Afterwards watch Hynes perform solo his hypnotic paean to love, Time Will Tell, even venturing out into the audience during the song.  Suffice it to say, Hynes is hardly inhibited.  Entertaining stuff!

Sharon Van Etten’s Are We There is at the top of our Best Albums of 2014.  If you don’t have it memorized by now, you are missing out.  Van Etten has now released the video for one of the best songs off of the album, Your Love Is Killing Me.  The video for the eyes-wide-open song is directed by Sean Durkin (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”) and stars Carla Juri (“Wetlands”).  Durkin’s work here is riveting throughout and limns well Van Etten’s lyrical lament (see lyrics at bottom).  And all the while SVE’s vocals are chill-inducing.  Check it out below.

Van Etten and her superb backing band continue to be on tour in support of Are We There.  Despite heatstroke-inducing heat, SVE and crew performed a mesmerizing set at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival earlier this month.  The tour dates can be viewed HERE.  Don’t you miss it.

Your Love Is Killing Me

“You said it best. You’ll be a man by the time I see you.
We’ve been through better days, and you’ve tasted all my pain.

Break my legs so I won’t walk to you.
Cut my tongue so I can’t talk to you.
Burn my skin so I can’t feel you.
Stab my eyes so I can’t see
You like it when I let you walk over me.
You tell me that you like it.
Your love is killing me.

Try to tell you this when I’m sober… how I feel about loving you.
Try to remember the turn of events, being led by our own fantasies.
Fantasies…

Break my legs so I won’t walk to you.
Cut my tongue so I can’t talk to you.
Burn my skin so I can’t feel you.
Stab my eyes so I can’t see
You like it when I let you walk over me.
You tell me that you like it
when our minds become diseased.

There he let it go, his temper, standing there.
See her with his gun and he steals love so he can feel alive
Everyone’s knees knockin’ at the fear of love. Taste blood.
Everybody needs to feel.

Break my legs so I won’t run to you.
Steal my soul so I am one with you.
From a distance I am on to you,
But I’ll stab my eyes out so I can’t see
You like it when I let you walk over me.
You say that you like it.
You love me as you torture me.
You say that you like it, but I won’t let you see
All that I can do is what I can
with this pain you’ve given me,
with this pain you’ve given me,
your love is killing me,
yes, all your pain is killing me.”

The great producer/musician/songwriter Daniel Lanois and some of our favorites The Antlers recently hooked up (excusez-moi) and will play a gig together in November at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple.  They’ve dubbed their collaboration Anti-Thesis (in honor of their label Anti-.  Coincidentally, the montage recently released a fabulously funereal remix by Lanois of The Antlers’ Doppelganger off of their superb album, Familiars.  Check it out below and after go over to NPR this week to listen to Lanois’ new album Flesh And Machine.

We love the collaboration and remix below!

Joseph Arthur (and the world) has been missing Lou Reed and The Zoo for over a year now.  On the one-year anniversary of Reed’s passing yesterday, Arthur paid tribute to his pal/mentor on KCRW and painted Reed’s portrait (seems to us).  This follows Arthur’s superb Reed covers album tribute to the man/artist known throughout the world as Lou.  Watch below and go HERE to listen to the full KCRW session.

Last week The Red Hot Organization released it’s long-awaited tribute album to cellist and composer Arthur Russell who passed in 1992 at a young age.  Entitled Master Mix: Red Hot + Arthur Russell, the release is another in a string of successful compilation albums from this organization (including the fantastic Dark Was The Night).  Master Mix: Red Hot + Arthur Russell contains emotion-appropriate covers of Russell’s songs, such as the heart-tugging, electro-fied take by Sufjan Stevens on the sweet song A Little Lost.   Check it out below, along with other great covers of Russell’s songs by the likes of Jose Gonzalez, Glen Hansard, Phosphorescent, Blood Orange and Richard Reed Parry, Little Scream, Sam Amidon, Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufeld, the latter ensemble covering the just-released Keeping Up.  We love ’em all, but for us Stevens’ and the just-released Keeping Up are really sticking with us in the wee small hours.  Go out and support this great effort and cause by picking up the treasure trove that is Master Mix: Red Hot + Arthur Russell HERE.

The tributes are pouring in from around the globe to mark the passing of the great Lou Reed one year ago (see Village Voice contributor Scott Anderson’s season-appropriate, sweet-Lou tribute above).

One of Lou’s longest collaborators (and another founding member of The Velvet Underground), the multitalented John Cale, has just released a touching Lou-tribute video for Cale’s song entitled  If You Were Still Around.  Watch the tribute to Lou (and to Warhol and Nico) below and recall your favorite Lou moment(s).  Most have got one or a hundred.  Our personal favorite is of that night at the Music Hall in New York City in May 2007 where we watched Reed come out to join Bright Eyes for an amazing mini-set of Reed’s songs .

Cale posted the video below with these words:

…thinking of Lou

“A Moth and a Candle met. They decided to become friends. Everyone enjoyed watching their discourse – especially the risk takers.  Then one day a big rain came. The Moth couldn’t fly and the Candle puttered out. Everyone laughed in bitter awe and blamed the rain. Most however knew the deeper truth – the Candle remains lit and the Moth will stay close.”

– John Cale, October 2014

RIP Lou.  We’ll see you on the other wild side.

We have been fans of Seattle’s Deep Sea Diver since we first heard their critically-acclaimed album History Speaks in early 2012.  Deep Sea Diver is guitarist/singer/songwriter Jessica Dobson’s (Shins) collaboration with her husband, drummer Peter Mansen, rounded out by Garrett Gue (bass) and Elliot Jackson (synth, piano, guitar, vocals).  Dobson is phenomenally adept on guitar and has a great  variety of winning vocal motifs.

The band recently released a scintillating EP entitled Always Waiting.  The four-song EP is comprised of a great range of sounds and moods, and has been on repeat at Chez Lefort for weeks now.  To get a better feel for this band and the new EP, check out the band’s fun new video for the fantastic One By One single off the EP and their live performance of the title-track Always Waiting on Seattle Channel.  We hear that Always Waiting is a precursor to their as-yet-untitled second album, which will be released in early 2015.  The band is out on mini-tour in support of Delta Spirit, and you can see the dates below the videos.

The entertaining One By One video was put together by Peter Mansen and was shot around Seattle with Mansen’s 6’10” younger brother Jon.  Check both great vignettes out below, and get to know Deep Sea Diver better.

Tour Dates with Delta Spirit

10.24 – Portland – Wonder Ballroom
10.25 – San Francisco – The Fillmore
10.30 – Los Angeles – El Rey Theatre

We often think we can do him justice with our mealy-mouthed words.  And then we throw up our hands ’cause nobody can do Leonard Cohen justice.  Now that he’s at the age of 80, his songs have moved us for 47 years since his debut album came out in 1967.  A scant 47 years of the rarest musical intelligentsia.  Shows how old you can be.  As we wrote previously, Cohen has just released his new album Popular Problems.  The song below confirms his virulence at that age.  Long live Leonard Cohen!  Aurally it smacks of Tom Waits and a few gifted angels.  Long live Leonard Cohen!