In honor of the awesome Iron Maiden T-shirt he wore during Bon Iver’s lush, incredible show at the Uptown Theater in Kansas City, Mo., this weekend, here’s a new track from muscly saxophonist Colin Stetson. It looks like they probably shot it during a recent soundcheck on this tour.

The video doesn’t do his guns justice, though. Up against the rest of the dudes in Bon Iver, the burl on those pipes makes him look like an NFL linebacker. But they’re clearly nothing compared to the ones in his throat. Dude is a singular talent. Enjoy “Part of Me Apart from You.”



“New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges” is out now, and highly recommended.

Wisconsin soft-rockers Bon Iver (whose live show I was lucky enough to catch in Kansas City about two months back) and Canadian chanteuse Feist both played “Later with Jools Holland” last week, and additional videos from those sessions have surfaced, now totaling six in all. 

I share because they’ve released two of this year’s most terrific albums and each has an absolute all-star supporting cast behind their live shows. Watch for Colin Stetson and his big, groaning bass sax behind Justin Vernon (dude smashes on “Perth”) and mom jeans-sportin’ vocal trio Mountain Man  bolstering Feist’s choruses. It’s a good thing those ladies’ voices are better than their haircuts.

My picks are “Perth” and “How Come You Never Go There,” but all six are posted below, for your perusal.

John Fullbright’s one of Oklahoma’s finest songwriters and one of our most disciplined students of Woody Guthrie’s school of often-critical, politically and socially conscious lyrics. And he’s not half-bad at tickling the ivories, either.

Fullbright recently performed “Fat Man,” about a selfish prig who “plucks life like a rose,” at the annual Cherokee Creek Music Festival in Cherokee, Texas, where it was filmed by Americana enthusiasts Music Fog:



Neon Indian — “Hex Girlfriend”

Here’s the earlier-promised video of Neon Indian performing at the second night of The Flaming Lips’ New Year’s Eve Freakout, shot by Nathan Poppe and myself. Alan Palomo shows off some serious confidence with those dance moves:



Colin Stetson — “Those Who Didn’t Run”
2011 was Colin Stetson’s year, releasing a lauded album of dystopian saxophone innovations that landed just outside of OKSee’s Top 10. If you can watch the 10 surrealistic minutes of nature shots that comprise “Those Who Didn’t Run” without losing focus, then you are a champion:



POLIÇA — “Lay Your Cards Out”
Once a folk singer up north, Channy Leaneagh (formerly Casselle) met up with Bon Iver collaborator Mike Noyce when she joined up with Wisconsin stoner soft-rockers Gayngs. The result is the avant, Auto-Tuned POLIÇA, and it kinda makes me wish she’d have stuck with more natural-sounding ways of making music. But, to each his own:



“Shut Up and Play the Hits”

If such a thing as a “perfect band” existed, or at least a band that acted exactly as it should, LCD Soundsystem was that band. Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace shot a film following front man James Murphy during his last couple days of LCD’s band-ship, which included a Last Show Ever for the record books. If the trailer’s any indicator, it looks fantastic: