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!

Londoner Tom Vek has ventured in and out of our musical consciousness for years, but we have never paid proper attention to him.  Well, to quote Vek (from the song below): “Nobody’s perfect!”  We hereby repent after catching smatterings of his great new album Luck and his recent performances on the multimedia circuits.  To get a feel for his punkier side, check out he and his mates’ performance below on KCRW of Sherman (Animals In The Jungle).  It’s somewhere between the Fall’s Mark E. Smith and Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, and we’re all in in that musical jungle.  Superb stuff from Tom Vek.  We’ve had it on repeat all day.  It’ll take ya back and lift you up.  We’ll have more about this deserving artist shortly.  You can listen to the rest of the KCRW set HERE.

We’ve been fans of Jessie Ware since she released her sophisto-pop debut album Devotion in 2012.  Ware is back now with new sophomore album Tough Love.

While not perfectly in our musical wheelhouse (and less subtle and pop-subversive than Devotion), we hereby laud Ware for Tough Love’s adding some more respectability to the pop genre.  This is pure pop for now people.  One of the most impressive songs off the new album is Say You Love Me.  When we first heard the song , we’ll admit we clicked off at about the 30-second mark.  Shows how wrong you can be.  Had we waited it out, we would have heard a pop masterpiece take flight somewhere between Ware’s stirring and sophisticated vocals, a sumptuous bridge and the addition of a full choir.   Check the song’s official video out below.  Afterwards, check out and Kind of…Sometimes…Maybe (helped on by Miguel) and Want Your Feeling (co-written by the multitalented Dev Hynes of Blood Orange) as performed live at the Barbican.

If you like your pop big and lush, go pick up Jessie Ware’s Tough Love.

For the last four-plus years, we and the rest of his ardent fans sat by and waited for one of our all-time favorites, Jamie T., to work through his personal slings and demons, and return to stage and studio.  Finally, Jamie T(reays)  is back and has delivered one of the Best Albums of 2014, Carry On The Grudge (0n Epitaph Records in the US).

Jamie T. (from Wimbledon–“T” as in tennis? We kid.) effectively disappeared in 2010 after delivering two of our favorite albums of the last decade, 2007’s Panic Prevention and 2009’s Kings & Queens.  When those albums were released we were head over heels for the unique, shambolic-but-effective mix of punk, ska, rap, and dub to go with clever, motormouthed tales of misbehaving mates, drinks, drugs, and death, all replete with stirring character studies.  It was a heady mix that helped us fill a massive void in the post-Clash, post-Strummer era (watch below as he channels Strummer through his left leg).  We were astounded when Jamie T. never made much headway with American music fans, but then again we’re constantly amazed by the moments of blindness.

Here’s to hoping that Carry On The Grudge changes all that.  The album carries a more mature vernacular filled with personal loss and lived-in-stories to go with a mostly-slowed and more-sung delivery (though to be fair, he exhibited the same before on favorite Emily’s Heart).  Predictably, some of the most affecting tracks are the slower numbers such as the stirring Don’t You Find, They Told Me It Rained (with its ending homage to Madness, amongst others), Limits Lie, Love Is Only a Heartbeat Away, Murder of Crows and Turn On The Light.  One thing that hasn’t changed is Jamie’s way with melodies, which here uniformly rival those of his mentor, Damon Albarn (the highest possible praise from these quarters).  Thankfully, there are plenty of uptempo tracks to balance matters, including the rambunctious Zombie, the self-immolating Peter, the decidedly nostalgic (Clash-esque with Tom Tom Club overtones) Trouble and Rabbit Hole.  Let’s face facts:  there’s not a bad song on this album, and quite to the contrary.  We can’t stop listening to the ravishing Carry On the Grudge.  Go get it HERE.

Coincidentally, Jamie T. recently appeared on Later with Jools Holland, and after viewing the performances we were all-in on Jamie T. and in quest of catching him live.  Watch below as Jamie and his superb band (the drummer!) slay Peter and They Told Me it Rained (unfortunately, their riveting performance of Zombie remains un-viewable in the US thanks to ongoing bizarre BBC policies–hey, it was ONLY a Tea Party ya teabaggers!).  We had forgotten that in addition to all of the foregoing accolades, Jamie is a virulent calist to boot.  After the Jools performances, watch a few more vignettes of this fine artist (including Zombie and Don’t You Find–and at bottom watch the song sung by 6,000 fans at the Reading Festival).  Most of his European tour is sold out or getting there, but he is coming to the US to play a whopping five (5!) shows and, bizarrely, tickets still remain.  One such show is at the Roxy in LA on December 3rd.  Whatever you do, don’t you miss it.  Get your tickets for the tour (including Australia) HERE and HERE for the Roxy.  If you don’t, you’ll carry on the grudge forever.

Last month British sister-group The Staves released Blood I Bled, the title track of a new EP produced by Justin Vernon (Bon Iver, Volcano Choir, etc.).  Now comes their official video for the song.  Check out again the fantastic, Feist-meets-Joni-Mitchell musical gestalt while watching the inspirational video set in India.  This song’s a builder!