As mentioned repeatedly, Caribou yesterday released its infectious and entrancing new album Our Love.  Coinciding with the album’s release, the band also released the official video for the album’s title track.  Check it out below.  The video’s director Ryan Staake had this to say about the video shot on location in Ireland at the Lough Ine House:  “I wanted to create a slow, brooding film that contrasted the seeming limitless of youth with the reality of death in later years.”  Mission accomplished.  For a more lively (if you will) interpretation of the song, afterwards watch Dan Snaith and band perform the track recently on KCRW.  Go pick up Our Love soon.  You won’t be disappointed.

One of Britain’s latest buzz-band is Glass Animals.  We were minding our own business the other month when out of nowhere the band’s song Gooey gummed up our earwaves.  What a groove!!  “Ride my simple song,” indeed!  The only knock on the band has been their lyrics, which are laden with abstraction and vague allusions.  We here promise, though, even there.  Let’s see what the future brings for this promising band.

Today, we happened upon KCRW where the band just happened to show up and play Gooey off of their critically-acclaimed debut album Zaba (there’s lots more where Gooey came from).  Check out the hypnotizing performance below.  You can listen to entire worthwhile session on Morning Becomes Eclectic HERE.  And go HERE to pick up the get their new album HERE.  Unfortunately, we were unavoidably elsewhere and couldn’t catch their raved-about shows at the Troubadour this past weekend in LA.

We’ll have more about Glass Animals soon come.

We receive intermittent song-semaphores from the interweb-acreage known as Crackerfarm.  Coming off our three-day-and-night Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival extravaganza (more on that later), we were particularly struck by the latest vignette of Seth Avett (you know, The Avett Brothers) singing his new, rootsy/satirical song California. Why on earth The Avett Brothers aren’t an annual staple at Hardly Strictly (rather than merely appearing in 2010 and 2006) we will never understand.  They were meant for the HSB Festival, and this song is living proof.  Let’s hear it for the Avetts at HSB 2015!

We are huge fans of Chuck Prophet and never miss an opportunity to pick up each newly-released album or to catch him live with the Mission Express (or otherwise).  Prophet recently released his fantastic new album Night Surfer.  To get a feel, check out his hilarious, heartwarming Official Video for new track Wish Me Luck below.  And then make your way to The Make-Out Room in San Francisco’s Mission District tonight (7pm sharp) and tomorrow (Sunday) at 2:45 at the Rooster Stage at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.  At HSB, Prophet will also be backed by a string section for what he’s dubbed the “Strings in the Temple” in which they perform songs from his superb, San Francisco-centric album Temple Beautiful.

So go make out tonight and get strung up tomorrow.  You’ll thank us later, despite how that sounds.

It’s been a busy week for the gifted rocker, Chrissie Hynde, who is out making the media rounds in support of her superb first solo (non-Pretenders) album entitled Stockholm.  First, she appeared on Conan and gave an electrified performance of new song You or No One.  She then followed up with a soulful, acoustic performance at KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic of Adding The Blue off the new album and the Pretenders’ I Go To Sleep (the latter with atmospheric melodica added).

Check ’em out below and get your tickets to see her at the Arlington Theater on December 5th HERE.

We’ve been hearing snippets of Canadian DJ-producer-remixologist Ryan Hemsworth for a while now, but until last week hadn’t heard a track that stopped us in our tracks.  Last week Hemsworth released the superbly wistful Snow in Newark, the first single from his impending new album (let’s call it Secret Songs for now) coming out on Last Gang Records.  With the graphic above and below (mail with postage, get it?), and the track’s obvious sound-allusions, Hemsworth makes obvious the influence of The Postal Service.  And yet, he delivers something all his own on the track.

Snow In Newark features Chicago’s Dawn Golden.  Listen to the track below, and to hear more of Hemsworth’s worthy work, go HERE and let fly.

We have quickly become huge fans of Hurray for the Riff Raff.  This has been a notable week of vignettes by and for HFTRR, including yet another winning set at KEXP (check out the second video below of the band recently performing Little Black Star) and the band’s performance of Hank Williams’ Lovesick Blues at the Albino Skunk Music Festival (see at bottom).

Of particular note, though, was HFTRR’s release of Everybody Knows (For Trayvon Martin).  Though written quite a while ago, the band never released the song until now.  Following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, however, leader Alynda Lee Segarra decided to release the the track.  This is not the first time Segarra and band have tackled social issues head-on.  On their album, Small Town Heroes, the band released The Body Electric, a song rightfully and artfully decrying violence against women. Segarra has gone on to establish The Body Electric Fund.  The group has recently begun an IndieGogo campaign to fund a video for The Body Electric and to help raise funds for both The Trayvon Martin Foundation and the Third Wave Fund.

About Everybody Knows (For Trayvon Martin), Segarra had this to say:

“I wrote this song last year, on February 26th, one year after Trayvon Martin was shot to death in a Florida suburb. A young black man barely 17 years old brought to his end for no reason other than suspicion. It also happened to be my birthday.  As I celebrated another year on Earth, I was haunted by the fact that his life ended so soon. After a visit to the Civil Rights museum in Memphis, I wrote this song. This song is a reminder that we must not forget him. We must not forget about the work that lies ahead of us.”

Check ’em all out below, and we’ll see you at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival next weekend where HFTRR will next play on Friday, October 3rd..

A reliable little bird brought us Bonobo initially in the form of their astonishingly great cut Cirrus. And now we are bona fide Bonobo fans.  While taking the world by storm, the group (led by Simon Green) pulled together and will soon release a concert DVD entitled The North Borders (the name of their superb 2013 album).  To get a sample, check out the tease of the band (with full orchestra and horn section) performing Kiara in Croatia below.  After, check out the DVD trailer.

As you can see HERE, Bonobo is on tour will make its way to California in late October. Be there.

Trailer:

After dropping some indecipherable, hieroglyphic hints recently, Thom Yorke (Radiohead, Atoms For Peace) has just released a brand new solo album, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes.  You can buy it via BitTorrent for $6 for the digital album or £30 (that’s like 10,000,000 drachma) for the deluxe vinyl + digital version.  Below is the announcement:

“Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes is a new eight-track record from Thom Yorke.

These are printed with a metallic silver laminate then multi-tone black and a striking neon green; the whole is enclosed in a bespoke anti-static shield bag – a metallised laminated material usually used by the electronics industry for protecting components from electrostatic interference. The bag is printed with neon green on both sides, and has a resealable grip closure.”

Here’s Yorke’s and frequent collaborator/producer Nigel Godrich’s BitTorrent explanation:

“As an experiment we are using a new version of BitTorrent to distribute a new Thom Yorke record.
The new Torrent files have a pay gate to access a bundle of files..
The files can be anything, but in this case is an ’album’.
It’s an experiment to see if the mechanics of the system are something that the general public can get its head around …
If it works well it could be an effective way of handing some control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work.
Enabling those people who make either music, video or any other kind of digital content to sell it themselves.
Bypassing the self elected gate-keepers.
If it works anyone can do this exactly as we have done.
The torrent mechanism does not require any server uploading or hosting costs or ’cloud’ malarkey.
It’s a self-contained embeddable shop front…
The network not only carries the traffic, it also hosts the file. The file is in the network.”

Amen to all that!  You can purchase now at tomorrowsmodernboxes.com.  In the meantime, stream brilliant new track A Brain In A Bottle and watch its video below.

It’s been a great week in Tweedy land.  Critics and fans are going bananas for the new Tweedy album Sukierae (Jeff Tweedy album-title mischievousness if there ever was–let’s see you close your eyes and spell it).

Today the father-son duo released the Official Video for track Low Key off of the album produced by the zany Nick Offerman.  The video features John Hodgman, “General Zod,” Chance, Mavis Staples, and the “Littlest Tweedy,” “Glenn Wilcodrums,” “‘Chicago Way’ Albini,” “Conan O’Richter” (the last three as dubbed by Hodgman), plus the Tweedy duo.  The video is so acerbic and cute, it’ll drive you bananas.

Not to mention Low Key is a great tune and song.  Enjoy.