Live and Loose

There's a new trend in music videos - one that can be traced back to the French site La Blogotheque and their "Take-Away Shows" - and it's brilliant. Bands play live songs with acoustic instruments in unusual settings (Arcade Fire in an elevator! Quasi at a dog run!), often while walking through a landscape or neighborhood. The results can be transformative, a peek behind the curtain. In all cases one is afforded a close-up of the band's dynamic, and almost always a deeper appreciation of their music is the result. Two of my favorite examples:

Tallest Man on Earth

Delafe y Flores Azules

Song

"All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us... See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it."
- Thomas Carlyle

Phosphorescent Transcendent

The new album from Phosphorescent, Here's To Taking It Easy, has taken hold of my life. Like a sunny laid-back mixtape of Neil Young, My Morning Jacket and Will Oldham, these songs unfurl in long rolls of groovy acoustic shamble, punctuated here and there by sly musical and lyrical surprises that just make you smile before enveloping you again in their honeyed sounds. "Hej, Me I'm Light" is so fucking sick it hurts. I simply can't stop listening to this thing, a strong contender for album of the year.