Hot new americana folkie soul

About the only New Year's Resolutions I manage to keep is finding some new music to love. This first one is a band from Canada and Chicago, and are newly formed about a year ago. I missed them last year at SXSW but I see a mid-March gap in their tour so I've got high hopes of seeing them this year. Birds of Chicago. Here's how they describe themselves:

ALLISON RUSSELL'S clarion voice wraps around the broken country-soul croon of JT NERO, delivering their tales of hope, despair and... seahorses. Echoes of mountain gospel, doo wop, and classic soul, with back porch instrumentation.

Sounds about right. I just got their album on iTunes and it is all good.

Here's a band I find out about due to the ravings of
Paste Magazine and NPR among others. The Lone Bellow. In the video below, their amazing vocal harmonies just tear up the place. There's more at the Paste and NPR links. Looks like there's a chance they might be breezing back this way in mid-March too (on tour with Ivan & Alyosha, another awesome 'discovery' band we found last SXSW).
Their album just came out this week, but I don't have it yet.

John Fullbright is an amazing singer and songwriter - so much heart and soul. He's one we discovered last year, saw him at a small acoustic venue and it was stunning. His album from 2012, "From the Ground Up," is his first studio album and it got a Grammy nomination. A lot of the songs on it are dealing with some religious conflicts - and don't we all know how that stuff can turn your head every which way but loose?!

Yup.