By: Dylan McDaniel

While James Murphy may have ended his run at the helm of LCD Soundsystem, he still knows how to make a crowd dance itself clean.  Murphy played a 2.5 hour long DJ set at the Unici Casa in Culver City on Wednesday night.  Murphy’s set was a part of the Lexus Pop-Up Concert series which is a partnership with Pandora (we’ve written about others HERE and HERE).  The Unici Casa was spectacular with chandeliers aplenty and lighting to make even the best nightclubs jealous.  There were also two luminous Lexus (Lexi?) prominently displayed.  The venue itself is off of the main drag in Culver City, but the Unici Casa was impressively adorned, and with an entrance line stretching WAY down the block, the cognoscenti were drawn to the event.

Murphy played a fab selection of four-on-the-floor and disco-ish tracks that slowly built up throughout the night till everyone was dancing.  It felt like what James Murphy might play at your next house party should you be lucky enough to have the musician/producer/restaurateur Murphy at the turntables.

We kept hoping a little bit of actual LCD Soundsystem vinyl might accidentally jump from his bag to the turntables, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. Maybe next time.

All photos by Rachel Murray/Getty Images for Pandora Media, except last photo: our vantage during the set.

Proving they remain one of the best live bands out there, Wilco has been winning best-of-festival accolades all summer long against all comers.  On August 10th, the band played an intimate acoustic set at the Columbia City Theater in conjunction with and on behalf of Seattle’s KEXP.  Check it out below.  There will be beauty in song.  Setlist at bottom.

Misunderstood
Random Name Generator
The Joke Explained
I’m Always in Love
War on War
Bull Black Nova
It’s Just That Simple
Give Back the Key to My Heart (Doug Sahm cover)
A Shot in the Arm
True Love Will Find You In The End (Daniel Johnston cover)
We’ve Been Had (Uncle Tupelo cover)

Encore:
California Stars (Billy Bragg & Wilco cover)

KCRW has just released yet another sterling vignette of Tobias Jesso Jr. from yesterday’s Morning Becomes Eclectic session with the artist. Check out Jesso (accompanied newly by great ensemble Duk) below performing his tremendous tune Leaving Los Angeles while in LA at KCRW.  Oh the ironies. Of course we all eventually “leave” in some fashion or another.  Given the great, additive performance with Duk below we roundly agree with Jesso, who wrote this about his newly fleshed out backup boys: “Can’t wait to tour with these guys.”  Indeed!

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

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.