Heartbreaking Bravery

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Tag: Groovy Kinda Love

March 4, 2014

Watch This: Vol. 15

Once again, an apology is in order; due to extensive travel (more on that in a minute) a regular Sunday Watch This posting proved impossible. This 15th installment is a more low-key affair than usual. Apart from two very, very electric full sets, the emphasis falls squarely on wistful moments. From a powerpop staple to Appalachian-infused up-and-comers with a serious punk pedigree to Katie Crutchfield’s signature defiant vulnerability, open wounds wind up being this week’s focal point. As each video proves in some small way, sometimes the best way to deal with open wounds is to address them.

1. Saintseneca – Happy Alone (BadRacket Recording)

While Saintseneca has earned multiple mentions on this site before, they’ve never wound up in Watch This. It’s a drastic oversight and this is a necessary correction. Their run-through of “Happy Alone” for BadRacket Recording is nothing short of outstanding. Saintseneca continues to find new ways to impress and up the respective anticipation for their ANTI- debut, Dark Arc.

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2. Matthew Caws – Inside of Love (KEXP)

When Nada Surf was still in the early stages of their career they were often written off as Weezer knockoffs. Many suspected they’d be unsustainable- and then they did the miraculous- they reinvented themselves and found themselves at the forefront of powerpop. Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws plays Let Go standout “Inside of Love” for KEXP here, as a part of the 15th anniversary celebration of Barsuk Records. It’s as winning now as it ever was.

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3. Great Thunder – It Takes  So Much (Live at Saint Vitus)

Katie Crutchfield has one of the most arresting voices in all of music, writes emotionally crippling lyrics, and Great Thunder just made a fucking incredible record. A live performance showcasing all of those things? What more could anyone possibly want?

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4. Hop Along (Live at Saint Vitus)

While any lineup that includes both Crutchfield twins is can’t-miss material, it’ll take something genuinely special to make an impression in the face of that. Luckily, for everyone, beloved Philadelphia act Hop Along proved more than up to the task and unARTigNYC was on hand to film all of it. While Get Disowned is (still) incredible on its own merits, the band comes into their own in a live setting. This is an impassioned 46-minute masterclass on how to do things right. Absolutely necessary viewing (and listening) material. 

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5. Priests (Live at The Pinch)

There have been recent claims that seeing Priests for the first time is akin to a religious experience and the live footage that continues to surface of the band goes a long way in supporting that theory. It doesn’t seem to matter when the footage is from, either. From the get-go this band’s been channeling the brooding intensity of Swans and deftly combining it with the politics of Sleater-Kinney and the discordant aesthetics of Sonic Youth at their most fearlessly minimal. All of that is why Priests are this week’s band to know. Extra note: shout-out to vocalist Katie Alice Greer for her outstanding interview work over at Fvck the Media. Be sure to go read that- but be sure to watch this.

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November 19, 2013

Great Thunder – Groovy Kinda Love (Album Review)

First off: apologies for the font issues yesterday’s Meredith Graves interview piece is still experiencing, those will hopefully be resolved at some point in the near future. Now, today’s event: Great Thunder.  Great Thunder have been one of the more hidden side projects for a while now, despite two incredible releases and the continuously rising profiles of both Swearin’ and Waxahatchee. Both their Strange Kicks EP and Sounds of Great Thunder LP showed flashes of their band members’ other projects influence. While this is still true of the absolutely massive Groovy Kinda Love, it’s to a much lesser extent.

Groovy Kind of Love utilizes an intimidating run time that nears 90 minutes to maximum effect. Great Thunder sheds all genre restrictions and just lets loose, exploring industrial, ambient, sludge, folk, drone, shoegaze, pop, and punk over the record’s 30 tracks. With that much material present, it could have been easy for Groovy Kinda Love to fall into a myriad of understandable traps. Instead, Great Thunder manage to subvert the litany of dangers that accompany this brand of over-stuffing through their wide-eyed earnestness. Each track avoids being relegated to filler status by utilizing a wildly different approach. One of the best examples of this comes around the two-thirds mark with an incredible five song run that’s book-ended by Katie Crutchfield’s signature stamp of defiant resignation in both “Sorta Prima Donna” and “Chapel of Pines”.

Unsurprisingly, the record’s most deliriously ragged moments seem to come from Keith Spencer, a key (if notoriously quiet) member of Swearin’. All of the stranger moments on that band’s most recent release, Surfing Strange, are wildly exceeded by the strangeness that runs rampant through the course of this one. Spencer gets to go into full on exploration mode and makes the most of everything he pulls into the band’s shape-shifting aesthetic. Jeff Bolt and Kyle Gilbride both step in to lend their talents to various parts of the record, essentially swapping one Crutchfield out for another momentarily. The results are just as thrilling as anything Swearin’ has accomplished so far.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a project worthy of either Swearin’ or Waxahatchee’s respective talents without a few moments of utter devastation. “Singer’s No Star” takes that hushed mentality to a place that cuts even deeper than the most emotionally unsettling moments of American Weekend. Crutchfield’s voice bleeds into a delicately handled piano line and resides in secret above a hauntingly effective doo-wop chorus. It’s a moment that can freeze even the most hardened listener. “You Left Me With an Ocean” utilizes a similar approach and achieves a similar effect, allowing a short run time to set up a quiet acoustic close.

While calling Groovy Kinda Love Great Thunder’s magnum opus may seem premature, it’s certainly not unwarranted or undeserved. It’s genuinely astonishing that this record actually achieves what it does. It’s not often a band makes a statement as bold, daring, or audacious as this record is. Unquestionably one of 2013’s most notable releases, it deserves to be in just about any serious record collector’s home. More importantly, it deserves to sit on the turntable, played into oblivion until the grooves have worn thin. This isn’t just a record. It’s a masterpiece.

Salinas is now taking pre-orders and the record can be streamed in full below.

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