FKA Twigs has taken the pop world by storm this year via her debut album, LP1, and alluring live performances.  She/they were the musical guest(s) last night on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and gave a visually-inventive (if nothing else) performance of the track Two Weeks.  Check out the performance below, in all its blowing-fabric-looking-alternately-like-a-pyre-then-jellyfish glory.  If your vocals are going to be a bit thin, best to break out some stunning, inventive visuals.  Mission accomplished then.  Fallon seconded by exclaiming, “Oh man, oh my goodness, I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

The electrifying Elbow today released an enigmatic visual ode to British Speedway racing via the track Charge off of the band’s album, The Take Off And Landing Of Everything, which is hovering at the very top of our current Best Albums of 2014 tally.  Check it out below.  The song’s elder’s-lament lyrics are at bottom and well worth your time, as with all Guy Garvey lyrics.

“I am electric
With a bottle in me
Got a bottle in me
And glory be these …. are ignoring me
I’m from another century
I am a preacher
When I’ve got it on me
And I’ve got it on me
And glory be these …. are ignoring me
We never learn from history

Hey
I am the beau who loved her so in every song
And I designed that little mystery on your tongue
I’ve broken jaws protecting laws to keep you free
I made your day so take a seat by me

I am an old tree
Gonna talk my jaw free
Someone come and get me
Another night beside myself would finish me
Give us G & T and sympathy
I am the diehard with an empty dance card propping up a young bar
I’m pouring oil in double time upon the troubled rising tide inside of me
Upon my history”

We’ve loved what we’ve heard so far from the impending new Damien Rice album, My Favourite Faded Fantasy, from Warner Music. To get a feel, go over to NPR to stream it until its release next week.  Produced by Rick Rubin, the album will likely end up high on our Best Albums of 2014 list.  The title track has already been a Lefort Song of the Week, and we have raved about tracks I Don’t Want To Change You and The Greatest Bastard, all of which bodes incredibly well for the new album.  Go listen at NPR and pick it up next Tuesday.

Kendrick Lamar will appear on SNL on November 15th.  Lamar has owned SNL twice, but when he performs this time he should be sporting a sack of new songs from his next album (to be released this year).   One new song that’s been released to much acclaim and is loved by Lefort is the track i , the lyric video for which you can watch below.  Lamar had this to say to Carson Daly recently about the new song:

“When I first started doing music, I did a lot for myself, just for my enjoyment, but then I started doing these shows and I start seeing these kids saying my song saved their lives [because] they were going to commit suicide.  It got a little bit deeper than me, you know?

As for the song’s cover art, Lamar told Daly:  “Where I’m from, there’s a lot of gang culture and things like that, so instead of throwing on up gang signs, which we used to, I put a Blood and I put a Crip together and we’re throwing up hearts.  It got a little bit deeper than just going with a simple contemporary hit record cliché sound, and I said I’m going to use my pedestal and speak about something much more and do it my way because I’d rather go out like that.”

As you’ll hear, the song features an old Isleys sample from That Lady, including Ronnie Isley’s iconic guitar riff.   Evidently Isley also added a few ad libs to the song himself.

Check it out, and get ready for Lamar on SNL on November 15th.  We can’t wait.

T-Bone Burnett and an amazing cast of musicians,  including Elvis Costello, Rhiannon Giddens (Carolina Chocolate Drops), Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes), Jim James (My Morning Jacket) and Marcus Mumford (Mumford & Sons), came together last March to write music for recently discovered lyrics handwritten by Bob Dylan in 1967, the same era in which the recording of his all-time Basement Tapes.  The result is the imminent album Lost On The River: The New Basement Tapes.

 To coincide, on November 21st, Showtime will broadcast the documentary Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes Continued.  To see a sample, check out below Elvis Costello and that fine collection of musicians killin’ on Six Months in Kansas City.  Costello must be a San Francisco Giants fan.

Afterwards, check out a trailer for the documentary.

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.”