Earlier this year, L.A.’s Americana singer-songwriter Holland Belle released her EP Wanderlust.  To get a feel, Belle has now released a superbly produced video for her revenant song, Lovely Ghost.

About the song, Belle has said:  “I wrote this song during a time where I was struggling to cope with and move on from past heartache.  It’s not completely about one event, more so it’s about the walls I slowly continued to build every time I was hurt.  It made me unable to move on and make healthy choices because these same walls that protect you also hold you back, and put you in an unhealthy cycle.  You make the same mistakes over and over.  To me, it was like being haunted by the past.”

About the video, Belle says that director James Pillion’s choice to shoot the video in and around the Salton Sea “served to represent a sort of purgatory for the storyteller.  She’s forced to wander until she can find, and confront the thing that’s keeping her there. For me it was a way of showing how we all get trapped in our minds, and in our pain.  And until we find a way to confront that pain, we will never heal and move forward.”

Heal.  And go forward.

Check the affecting video below and Belle’s sonorous vocals, and then go HERE to pick up Wanderlust (which features a stirring accapella rendition of traditional House of the Rising Sun).

Tobias Jesso Jr. is one of the brilliant new lights shining on the music scene.  As we’ve written since last year, Jesso plies his listeners with melodious piano ballads that will stop you in your tracks with their poignancy and pathos.  But what we hadn’t heard as much, was Jesso performing while backed by a brazen big band (replete with horn section).  Jesso and band showed up on KCRW today and let fly in a glorious way.  Check out below their scintillating performance of great cut, How Could You Babe.  Wow!

You can watch Jesso and crew perform seven (7!) additional songs on KCRW HERE.

Jesso plays LA’s FYF Festival this Saturday, August 22nd, and then will return to the California in October.  Check the tour dates HERE.

Photograph: David Levene for The Guardian

The indie-pop threesome, Bad Bad Hats, hail from Minneapolis and recently released their debut album Psychic Reader as a free download (who do they think they are, Radiohead or U2?).  We like everything we’ve heard so far from this winning trio, but especially Fight Song (first up below).  Singer Kerry Alexander and the boys sound to our ears like a winsome mash-up of Best Albums of 2012 faves Allo Darlin’ (No. 1 that year) and Like Pioneers (No. 2 and where have they gone?).  High praise in our book.  Check ’em out below.

You can download the entire Psychic Reader for free HERE, but why not kick in some cash while you’re at it?  Bad Bad Hats are out on tour and headed to the West Coast in October (with the The Mynabirds) as you can see HERE.

What goes around comes around.  We’ve previously seen musical artist Thundercat support Flying Lotus  (and others, including Kendrick Lamar) on numerous occasions, including repeated network television forays.  Last night on Why? with Hannibal Buress Thundercat got support from FlyLo on a funky-great live take on Thundercat’s song Them Changes off of  his album-ella, The Beyond/Where the Giants Roam.   Check out Thundercat’s superb bass-playing below.

Afterwards, watch the first musical performance on Why? with Hannibal Buress:  Open Mike Eagle, Thundercat and Flying Lotus performing Ziggy Starfish (Anti-Anxiety Raps) off Open Mike Eagle’s recent album, A Special Episode Of.  Dang that’s seriously great bass.  And a beauty from Open Mike Eagle.

All so very good.

Destroyer has yielded yet another superb song from their new album Poison Season, which is due on August 28th via Merge Records.  Check out below new track Times Square.  With its horns and breezy musical gestalt, Times Square is the most Kaputt-esque song yet from the new album.  That’s high complement in our book.  As we’ve written before, we can’t wait for Poison Season.

You can pre-order vinyl/cd HERE and digitalis HERE.

The world music realm has recently been providing especially superb music and videos in support (e.g. Mbongwana Star).  We previously shared the video for Down by world music artist Petite Noir.  Now comes a similarly mesmerizing video for track Best off of the debut album, La Vie Est Belle / Life Is Beautiful (arriving on September 11th from Domino).

The director of the video below, Travys Owen, has explained the video, which assays modern Africa, in a press release as follows: “We wanted to make four distinct ‘tribes’ of people. This allowed us to create the visual journey that Petite Noir (Yannick Yolunga) is on, running through all of these different landscapes, and allowed us to create these rich scenes which were very different from each other. The four main elements in the video are Fire, Malachite (earth/rock), Water, and Gold. The video is about Yannick’s journey through all of these landscapes meeting all of these different tribes.”

Check it out below.

You can pre-order the upcoming album HERE.

We have paraded a plethora of pixels over the years on the otherworldly-talented Joanna Newsom, but it’s been entirely too long since we last had reason to sing her praises.  After five years, Newson has announced she will finally loose her next album Divers on October 23rd on Drag City.

As its clarion call, Newsom has today released a new video, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, Inherent Vice in which she acted) for new track Sapokanikan. Sapokonikan (‘land where the tobacco grows’) was the name given by the native American Lenape tribe for the settlement that would later become part of Greenwich Village, and was essentially a docking point for many traveling native American tribes.

As usual Newsom is joined on the album by Ryan Francesconi, but with the added assistance of the talented Nico Muhly and the Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth.  And Steve Albini and Noah Georgeson recorded the album.  We can’t wait.

You can pre-order Divers HERE and HERE.  The tracklist is at bottom.

Divers tracklisting:

01. Anecdotes
02. Sapokanikan
03. Leaving the City
04. Goose Eggs
05. Waltz of the 101st Lightborne
06. The Things I Say
07. Divers
08. Same Old Man
09. You Will Not Take My Heart Alive
10. A Pin-Light Bent
11. Time, As A Symptom

Last night Jon Stewart and The Daily Show went out in style after 16 years of greatness.  To close out the finale, Stewart asked Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band to come on and perform a song request:  Land of Hope and Dreams (which segued into Born to Run).  As usual with the artist and the E Street Band, it was a joyous event, culminating in Stewart, his family, friends, staff and colleagues all dancing along and singing the chorus of Born to Run.  And there was joy amongst the tears.

Watch below as Stewart introduces Springsteen as:  “[a]n artist I really admire said that he thinks of his career as a long conversation with the audience, a dialogue. And I really like that metaphor for many different reasons. But the main one is, because it takes away the idea of finality.  This show isn’t ending. We’re merely taking a small pause in the conversation. A conversation which, by the way, I have hogged … I’ve really been dominating this in a really selfish way. So rather than saying goodbye, or goodnight, I’m just gonna say: I’m gonna go get a drink, and I’m sure I’ll see you guys before I leave.  So here it is. My moment of zen.”

Classy to the end.

We’ve been fans of Brooklyn’s Helado Negro ever since we first heard his great song Ghost Dance over two years ago.  But we became even bigger fans after catching his superb croon-filled sets as opener on label-mate Sufjan Stevens’ recent tour.  Helado Negro has just released a new video for his emotive song Young, Latin and Proud.  About the song, Roberto Carlos Lange (he is Helado Negro) has said “contemporary Latino culture is underrepresented and consistently confused with cliches that haunt more commercial representations.  My interest in creating this song was always a private one, a possible dialogue between me and a very young me. Singing me to sleep after a long day, letting me know that it’s okay to be young, Latin and proud.”  The minimalist animation of the video below limns well the subtly powerful song.  To be both we say: bravo!