A pair of rehearsal videos from Rawkblog ‘09 Band to Watch Ravens & Chimes just went up on YouTube. “Outside the Window” is above and “Spend the Night With You” is after the jump; both are the kind of evocative, insistent indie folk we’ve come to expect from the group, who are in the midst of recording their sophomore album. Promising stuff. Update: “Outside the Window” has been taken down, hope you got to hear it; “Spend the Night With You” is above.
Some sad news on Memorial Day: Jay Bennett, the Chicago multi-instrumentalist who added his talents to Wilco’s Being There, Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot before being embarrassingly ousted from the band on camera in the documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, died in his sleep on Sunday morning, Billboard reports. He was 45. For better or worse, his appearance in the film — which he sued band frontman Jeff Tweedy for royalties from, among other things, earlier this month, bizarrely — made him out to be a bit of a clown interested mainly in “easy rockers,” and a musician who had a hard time interpreting Jeff’s intentions for the experimental YHF, but he was a formidable performer in his own right. “Reasons For You To Love Me,” one of the best songs to emerge from the YHF sessions, found a home on his album Bigger Than Blue, and he is considered to have been a driving force in the band’s move away from alt-country on Summerteeth — a move that set the stage for the wide-ranging rock of YHF and A Ghost Is Born. Chicago Sun-Times critic Jim DeRogatis has more on Jay’s untimely passing. [Correction: Jay died on Sunday morning, not Monday.]
News: Weezer has a new album coming in two months, says an otherwise reticent Rivers.
And!: Rawkblog contributor Cayla McCrae is alive and Twittering at the Sasquatch Music Festival, which kicked off about two hours ago. Check back later this weekend for photos and good vibes.
The lead-up to Grizzly Bear’s May 26 release date for Veckatimest continues with “Two Weeks,” a video worth watching for Dan Rossen’s facial expression at the 1:15 mark, not to mention the David Lynch-y ending. Also, bowties! (It bears mentioning that the Yogi/Boo Boo-themed band shows up in a photo collage in the new issue of GQ deriding hipsters’ wholesale embrace of preppy culture; this video is not going to help. For the record, I’m typing this in boat shoes and a cardigan.) Another recent video, the band’s Black Cab session, is here.
There’s been a dearth of Jon Brion-affiliated chamber-pop in recent years, following the mini-renaissance of the early ’00s that kicked off with Fiona Apple’s 1999 When The Pawn and Aimee Mann’s Magnolia. With co-production from frequent Brion collaborator Tom Biller, Vincent Minor fills the gap nicely. Along the lines of Badly Drawn Boy’s About A Boy soundtrack or Rufus Wainwright’s Poses, Minor’s Born In The Wrong Era EP satisfies all the expected adjectives — clever, quirky, tuneful — with its piano-based pop, missing only the towering charisma of his latest antecedents. Minor has a full-length due this fall; let’s hope he can turn up the charm.
We Listen For You has another entry into their solid Silverlake Steps concert video series — Los Angeles’ most exuberant rockers, the Henry Clay People. The video captures the band in shambling, stripped down fashion, a sound that works surprisingly well for the normally raucous act. Modern sounds in country and western music ’09?
I was covering Bamboozle Left for the Los Angeles Times last April, so I didn’t post all the photos here — but since 3Oh!3 played the best profanity-laden goofball party rap I’ve heard since old-school Beastie Boys and the above photo has become my most popular shot on Flickr (or as Stan Lee would say, Because you demanded it!), here’s a belated gallery of the Hamburglaring band.
Grizzly Bear won’t be on The Late Show thanks to time constraints, Ed Droste tweets. The band was going to play Veckatimest life-alterer “Ready, Able” with a string quarter. Aghh! More: Grizzly Bear
Some sad news on Memorial Day: Jay Bennett, the Chicago multi-instrumentalist who added his talents to Wilco’s Being There, Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot before being embarrassingly ousted from the band on camera in the documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, died in his sleep on Sunday morning, 
New Music: Some serious recs by 
There’s been a dearth of Jon Brion-affiliated chamber-pop in recent years, following the mini-renaissance of the early ’00s that kicked off with Fiona Apple’s 1999 When The Pawn and Aimee Mann’s Magnolia. With co-production from frequent Brion collaborator 
