I first stumbled on this site thanks sort of indirectly to zatandad, who, on one day sometime around ad’s birthday and the new year, I went over and they were all like “YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS VIDEO AND LISTEN TO THIS GUY WHO WALKS AROUND AND PLAYS HIS TRUMPET ON THE STREET”.
That guy was Beirut’s Zach Condon, and I quickly got obsessed with the trumpets, the drums, the violins that make up his eclectic Eastern sound. The walking in the street thing, as it turned out, wasn’t completely his thing (although it really does fit the nomadic gypsy vibe he has) – it belongs (if such a thing can belong to someone) to the people at Blogotheque (yes they’re really French) who film bands who swing through Paris. They take these bands, who are forced to strip their music down to the essentials and walk around Parisian streets entertaining/weirding out Parisian folk.
The site is a bit hard to navigate cos it’s mostly in French, but if there’s an indie band you like and they’re relatively known, you can bet they’ve strummed a guitar through Paris and it’s on film And it’s a really awesome way to check out new music – it’s such a nice, fresh way of watching a group perform live without the shakiness, darkness, general mayhem that are live shows on YouTube.
The Beirut-Blogotheque relationship is pretty special cos the French guys travelled all the way to New York to film every song off the Flying Club Cup album in New York. You can see all those videos here.
Apparently there have been some copycats, and I know one of them is called the Handheld Shows but I couldn’t find anything on Google. If you do, let us know.
Bonus bonus: The reason I was thinking about Zach Condon this morning was because of this guy – Merz. You probably don’t care that Coldplay likes him, but check him out anyway!
I heard a track from Bon Iver for the first time last year but I wasn’t completely blown away. Then today I listened to a recording of him performing live at South by Southwest and I suddenly liked it. So I went and listened again to a few tracks from his album, For Emma, Forever Ago, and I realised why the discrepancy — he sounds much better live than on the CD.
He’s big on the falsettos, so you might not even agree with me on that if you don’t like falsettos. But I think his voice has a raw, gritty and vulnerable quality that makes his live performance quite visceral.
Bon Iver is really just one guy named Justin Vernon. He wrote For Emma, Forever Ago, his debut CD, while holed up in a cabin in Wisconsin trying to exorcise some inner demons. I think the concert recording captures the darkness, misery and anguish really well, while the album sounds too… clean.
True story: I listened to Feist’s version of Lover’s Spit in its entirety on Wednesday morning while waiting for the bus … and afterwards I felt really, really bad. Like, want to feign sickness, go home and crawl into bed kind of bad.
Which, of course, means that Lover’s Spit is a very GOOD song. I first heard the Broken Social Scene version a year back, then again when I went for Mosaic. But the Feist version hit me like a fat brick when I watched Half Nelson.
See – one paragraph, three other things you should check out.
Although I listened to Illinois quite a bit when it first came out (fuelled by my intrigue for a man whose name incited so many useless pronounciation arguments), I never really bothered with YouTube-ing him to death. Which is weird, as you know, for me.
I always knew that Sufjan’s (Sufyan? Soo-yan? Soppian??) finely-crafted music would be a shame to watch ‘live’, because, well, he’s not Rufus Wainwright now is he. But I don’t mean to rag on Sufjan. Rufus doesn’t use a gazillion instruments. And strictly-piano players always know the right way to scale their songs down for live shows.
Having given you all that useless prelude, I come to the point of my post:
Come on! Feel the Illinoise! -Part I: The World’s Columbian Exposition -Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me in a Dream
a.k.a. longest song title ever. But the movements in the song seem to merit that length. My favourite part is Part II. I googled Carl Sandburg: an American poet, historian, novelist, balladeer and folklorist. (prepare to spend a good half an hour or so at wiki)
The second part of this Sufjan Stevens song is like, the best quick promo for a human being ever. I am now going to find myself some Carl Sandburg poems while you listen to the song (part II starts about 3 mins into the song):
Rufus Wainwright can do no wrong. Even when his titles make me blush (Between My Legs).
Although I haven’t obsessed over Release The Stars as much as I obsessed over Want One, I still love it dearly, and Rufus’ video for ‘Rules and Regulations’ (below) reminds me of how I used to stay up late to watch the ‘April Fools’ video over and over and wish I could be one of his bitchez.
Yasmine and Joon, and we did this because we wanted to have a place where we could collectively store all the things that make us go ‘Wooooooooooot’ on MSN.
Have anything to recommend back to us? We promise we won’t let lazy interns delete your emails to theportableguide [at] gmail.com.
I first stumbled on this site thanks sort of indirectly to zatandad, who, on one day sometime around ad’s birthday and the new year, I went over and they were all like “YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS VIDEO AND LISTEN TO THIS GUY WHO WALKS AROUND AND PLAYS HIS TRUMPET ON THE STREET”.
And it’s a really awesome way to check out new music – it’s such a nice, fresh way of watching a group perform live without the shakiness, darkness, general mayhem that are live shows on YouTube.
He’s big on the falsettos, so you might not even agree with me on that if you don’t like falsettos. But I think his voice has a raw, gritty and vulnerable quality that makes his live performance quite visceral.
bad.
Which, of course, means that Lover’s Spit is a very GOOD song. I first heard the Broken Social Scene version a year back, then again when I went for 
