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Beautiful weather here in Portland as I recover from the long week.  I waded into the video pool for the first time and I was rather pleased with the results, which ya’ll will see soon.  Probably do about three posts for MusicFest to wrap everything up.  Saw tons of great music.  Recovered this morning by watching the Patriots eek out a win after losing Tom Brady.  Not so good.  Also, in terms of video – it took me all morning to compress and upload videos to both Vimeo and YouTube.  I prefer Vimeo for the quality and functionality, but YouTube took less time to upload.  Any reader suggestions out there for a novice to save me the headaches of spending an entire day essentially uploading videos?

Hope everyone had a great weekend.  We’re taking today to catch up on a lot of stuff that has been piling up.  So you can expect a fairly busy day from us today and then we’ll be back to our old slacker selves for the foreseable week.  To kick things off we’ve got the new video from Jack Johnson.

It’s for “Hope,” just one of many excellent tracks of his new LP Sleep Through the Static.  I got to thinking recently, that Jack Johnson in many ways resembles Tom Petty.  Neither are particularly great at the guitar or particularly deep with their lyrics, or have any discernable quality that you would call outstanding.  But there’s something about both of them that makes them so damn enjoyably uncool.

This video is emblematic of that.  Just the band in the studio singing and playing in a relaxed way.   Still though I wish this album has come out about a month before summer.

Sleep Through the Static is out now via Brushfire Records.

“Myriad Harbour” is such an affecting yet strange composition.  It’s a simple song about landing in New York City and ambling for something great to happen in the way that only seems possible in NYC.  I don’t know what it is, but the thing that strikes me about NYC is that anything can happen once you get there.  That feeling of aliveness just doesn’t exist in the same light in other cities.

I’m not sure this video does that, but the animation is cool nonetheless.   On this song, Dan Bejar’s vocals have never been better and I wonder how this song would mutate if it were done by Bejar’s regular band Destroyer.   When he sings with The New Pornographers, you almost feel like Carl has to reel in some of Bejar’s most ambitious tendancies.

Mp3: The New Pornographer’s – “Myriad Harbour”

Back when Icky Thump came out I was having a chat with one of my buddies, who might possibly love The White Stripes more than me. Anyway, we were talking about the merits of the album, how it was very worldly with Spanish, Mexican, Scottish influences among many other. The downside was that it was a White Stripes album and after awhile you begin to get an idea of what exactly a “White Stripes” album will inevitably soundlike.

And then my buddy Jay goes, “well all I can say is Cooooooooonnnnnqqqqqquuuuuuuuessst!” And I have to hand it to him, that might be the best one word review of any album this year. Here’s the bullfighting vid, with Jack doing his matador thing and Meg looking on at the puppy eyed bull.

Not as good as the eBay commercial though.