Music to Inspire: Hiatus Kaiyote & Alabama Shakes

I'VE BEEN GETTING a lot of random "hey have you heard of these guys..?" lately and wanted to pass along a couple of cool new finds. Both fronted by very talented female guitar vocalists. Both Grammy award winning bands...

Hiatus Kaiyote is a band out of Melbourne, Australia and your guess is as good as mine what genre they fall under. I saw one google listing as "multidimensional polyrhythmic gangster shit" but jazz fusion could also cover it. Classified by style or not, they are very tight and very cool. Check out By Fire...

Many of you have probably already heard the Alabama Shakes; but my world being kind of small lately, they were new to me. Woooooow -- what a voice!! Brittany Howard is a force to be reckoned with. Hailing from Athens, Alabama they all met in the local area and slowly gathered steam. I love how their Wikipedia listing described their formative period...

"...during this time the band members held other day jobs: Howard as a fry cook and then a postal worker, Johnson at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant, Cockrell at an animal clinic, and Fogg painting houses. For much of their early years, the Shakes performed shows on weekends at "sports bars and country dives."

Check out Hold On...