Nusic Mews

St. Vincent apparently spent the weekend in Dallas helping out by waitressing at her brother-in-law's new taqueria, and Father John Misty has a (relatively) new video partially inspired, he says,  by the LeBron James quote "It is precisely the superficial differences between people who are otherwise alike that inform the hostilities between them."

New St. Vincent

New song, new look.  Same band, but, apparently, a new show.  

Where's the guitar? 

St. Vincent on SNL

So this happened last night: St. Vincent on Saturday Night Live.  Not bad and in fact I like the mix, as you can hear her guitar even better than on her latest album, the eponymous St. Vincent, or than I heard at her show at The Tabernacle. 

David Byrne & St. Vincent Revisited

So this is nice . . . if you go over to the Love This Giant website, you can download a copy of Brass Tactics, a free five-song EP from David Byrne and St. Vincent.  "It has one song that didn’t make it on the record (a waltz featuring some lovely glass harmonica), a couple of energized remixes of some of the album tunes and two live tracks of the sort of more familiar material we do in the set" (spoiler alert: it includes Road To Nowhere). 

Also, this:

Dude, I Was There!

One of my favorite concerts of the year was held during MusicFest Northwest, but wasn't actually a part of MFNW, when My Morning Jacket played an outdoor show in McMenamin's Edgefield in rural Troutdale, Oregon.  Some magic combination of MMJ's epic jams, the beautiful setting, the sunset, and the fact that my being there was totally unplanned (my itinerary had me seeing Kishi Bashi in the basement Doug Fir Lounge over in Portland) all made it a very special show.  The quality of this fan video isn't professional but it isn't all that bad either, and it does give a fairly good impression of what the show was like.  As I recall, this number was about a third of the way into the set.

I don't like to rank anything as "Concert of the Year," as that's such a relative title, and many shows deserve top ranking for one aspect of the performance or another.  But, because such things are traditional at the end of the year, here in chronological order are some of my favorite concerts of 2012:

1. Akron/Family, Drunken Unicorn, January 14
2. Thurston Moore, The Goat Farm, February 8
3. Allo Darlin' & The Wave Pictures, 529, April 28
4. Damien Jurado, The Earl, May 23
5. Sonic Generator performing Steve Reich's Drumming, The Goat Farm, July 27
6. Dirty Projectors, Variety Playhouse, August 9
7. M83, Bumbershoot, Seattle, September 3
8. Low, Bumbershoot, Seattle, September 3
9. Black Mountain, Doug Fir Lounge (MFNW), Portland, Oregon, September 8
10. My Morning Jacket, McMenamin's Edgefield, Troutdale, Oregon, September 9
11. Animal Collective, The Tabernacle, September 30
12. David Byrne & St. Vincent, Cobb Energy Center, Marietta, Georgia, October 3
13. TOPS, Farm 255, Athens, Georgia, October 6
14. Sharon Van Etten, Terminal West, October 27