This is one of my favourite websites. It’s French, so it can be tricky to find your way about, but it is totally worth it once you do. Your favourite bands, as you’ve never or rarely seen them, as well as what will be your new favourites. Beautifully captured by French film maker Vincent Moon, the musicians play acoustic sessions on quiet streets, on busses, under the Eiffel Tower. Arcade Fire, The Shins, Beirut, Fleetfoxes, Bon Iver, to name only a few from a huge list.

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Volcano Choir is a collaboration between Justin Vernon of Bon Iver fame, Collections of Colonies of Bees, and Pele, and showcasing hypnotic driving rhythms coupled with Vernon’s soaring voice over the dainty post-rock indie twiddlings of the other bands.

I made this short fan video for Bon Iver’s new single Holocene while road tripping with my little brother on the South Island of New Zealand this winter.

The final track on the new Bon Iver record made myself and the other three people in the car laugh out loud the first time it came on: the sexophone (yes), the tasty guitar licks, the Whitney Houston piano. But then you hear it a few more times and it’s pretty tops isn’t it? And then you hear people debating whether ‘he did it on purpose’ or whatever, but that really doesn’t matter now does it?

A nice little mash-up between the lovely Lykke Li and the ever-talented Bon Iver. The original is deeply intimate, whereas this rendition takes the song to the great outdoors and injects vibrant percussion, accompanied by the funky moves of Sweden’s finest export since Bjorn Borg’s mullet.

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Red hot Montreal band Land of Talk feature Elizabeth Powell, a former punk who got her start playing her own anti-rock anthems on the local scene of Guelph, Ontario, during her mid-teens. We got the inside word from her on the tunes that inspire Land of Talk’s own high energy frock and roll. The first track she propped was, drum roll please, Bon Iver’s hauntingly evocative, Re:Stacks: ‘This song changed my course, emotionally. I can’t tell you how, but it levelled me. Everyone I’ve played it for, or who has heard it, has had the same or similar reactions. This is a song I will listen to well into my twilight years’. Read the rest of Land Of Talk’s Secret Playlist.

The man who brought us the masterpiece, For Emma, Forever Ago, is soon to release the follow-up EP, Blood Bank. Given the staggering acclaim For Emma received, his approach to the release must have been a nervous one, weighed down by the expectations of an entire music industry and its league of followers. Blood Bank is no disappointment, though: he calls it a ‘palette cleanser’ after For Emma, and it continues its themes of wintery isolation and introspection. The harmonies on tracks like Beach Baby are beautiful, and the production equally exquisite.