Literature | Heartbreaking Bravery

August 25, 2015

NE-HI – Turncoat (Music Video)

Over the past five days or so, there’s been quite a few great pieces of art to emerge out of the shadows and a small handful of them wound up being music videos. Vacation’s minimalist art clip for “4341“, Miserable’s head trip of a video for “Orchid“, Courtney Barnett’s characteristically charming “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party“, Literature’s bookish, winking “The Girl, The Gold Watch and Everything“, and The Underachievers’ fascinating triptych for “Chasing Faith”, “Rain Dance”, and “Allusions” all qualified. Still, despite all of those strong offerings, nothing managed to grab my attention more than NE-HI’s new clip for “Turncoat”.

One of the first great surprises of 2015 for me was NE-HI’s explosive set in the blistering cold of an outdoor stage in their hometown of Chicago for The Empty Bottle’s annual Music Frozen Dancing festival. Since that day, the band’s been making a series of perfectly-timed power moves and capitalizing on their growing momentum. While their self-titled effort from last year has remained a strong release, the quartet’s latest material has tapped into something that NE-HI only provided a few faint, scattered hints at- and in doing so, they’ve elevated themselves from a good band to a great one.

For their latest trick, they tapped Ryan Ohm and Jackson James from Weird Life Films to create a clip to accompany their latest single, “Turncoat”, and the end result is surprisingly beautiful. Deeply atmospheric, cinematic, and wielding a genuine sense of place, “Turncoat” is a stunning portrait of a very specific sect of America: the upper Midwest’s suburban working class. For me- as someone who grew up in small town Wisconsin and was raised by two teachers- every shot rings true and comes across as lovingly articulated.

There was always a beauty to be found in an environment that occupied a middle ground, providing space for both unlimited promise and inevitable decay. In those situations, you have to force your own narrative through-lines and, accordingly, the clip for “Turncoat” simply features an unnamed man going fishing and nothing else. It’s in those small moments where life gains a certain amount of meaning, pushing contemplative nature to the wayside in favor of simply being. Ohm and James effectively convey this through a series of world-building shots intercut with their main character going through the basic motions that a fishing trip entails, all the while backed by a lilting NE-HI track that ranks among the band’s very best. It’s a deceptively large concept that allows both the video and the song to take an equal amount of focus, while all of the tangential elements factor into an elegant execution that feels akin to magic.

Watch “Turncoat” below and keep an eye on this site for more updates on the band’s future projects.

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December 20, 2014

Male Bonding – A Kick to the Face (Stream)

In the last batch of posts, there were recaps built around some of last week’s finest musical moments. There was a brief delay in regularly-scheduled content that necessitated an outpouring of material to keep this site’s regular coverage humming along. Similarly, this post will concentrate on the music moments worth celebrating to have emerged from the Monday-Thursday range. Following this post will be two more entries dedicated to some of the stronger musical content that emerged on Friday. With all of that out of the way, it’s time to dive on into the three major categories: single streams, full streams, and music videos.

As is wont to happen over a period of time, there were some fairly extraordinary songs that surfaced in this week’s first stretch. Some of the more favorable ones included the following: Gal Pals’ zippy throwback basement pop stomper “Ex-Marionette“, Evans The Death’s absolutely monumental “Don’t Laugh At My Angry Face” (a legitimate song of the year candidate), Los Angeles Police Dept.’s severely bummed out holiday tune “Oh Lonely Night“, Menace Beach‘s latest stunning Ratworld teaser “Tastes Like Medicine“, No Monster Club’s defiantly vibrant (and tantalizingly weird) bedroom pop earworm “Arms Across America“, The Julie Ruin’s mesmerizing “Blueberry Island“, Kind of Like Spitting’s revitalizing “Bullied By A Bee“, the best remix from Perfect Pussy’s Shaun Sutkus to date (this time of Rubblebucket’s “Carousel Ride”), and an absolute monster cover of Wipers’ “Mystery” from site favorites Meat Wave.

Music videos fared just as well, with a few very resonant clips. There was Small Houses’ engaging visual journey for “Staggers and Rise“, Cave People’s wearily homespun “Brace“, and Literature’s woozily kaleidoscopic “New Jacket“. Additionally, there was Anti Pony’s seductively colorful “I Go Places“, WRAY’s effortlessly propulsive “Bad Heart“, Laura Marling’s autumnal and slow-galloping “Short Movie“. Rounding things out were Breakfast In Fur’s jaunty graphics experiment “Shape“, Erase Errata’s near-static stunner “My Life In Shadows“, and a resoundingly powerful reminder that TV On the Radio got where they were by virtue of making excellent decisions; “Lazerray” is yet another towering culmination of several wise moves.

Full streams were, comparatively, a little shorter in supply- but there were still a few gems that were unearthed and brought to life. Lazy threw caution and fear out of the window with their Soft Sheets 7″, Trauma Harness unveiled a severely damaged basement punk triumph with their discography-spanning Advent Calendar, and TIT (a collaborative effort between Digital Leather and The Hussy) offered up a stream of their psych-drenched self-titled 12″. Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle provided a quietly intense and arresting live recording of one of his extremely intimate house shows (and appropriately titled the recording House Show). There was also a very personal release from Jarad Charles Lee Francis Olson that tethers a wide-reaching array of genre influences into something unwaveringly hypnotic and, ultimately, tragic (while still managing to subtly incorporate a devious streak of dark humor) in the My Cats Are My Dogs EP.

Even with all of that to consider, today’s feature fell to an anomaly of a track- Male Bonding’s standalone single, “A Kick to the Face”. The title’s an immediate eyebrow-raiser and the accompanying title track lives up to its promise. All scorched-earth and fury, it’s an exploration of an abusive relationship that simultaneously rails against the fact that they’re a common occurrence and empathizes with the abused. Structurally, it’s constantly shifting and punctuated by brief bursts of searing intensity before sharply settling back into its normal pace, providing a near-perfect reflection of the song’s central topic. It’s a brave track that suggests Male Bonding’s ambitions may be higher than they initially let on- and it’s one hell of an appetizer for whatever the band’s cooking up next.

Listen to “A Kick to the Face” below and keep an eye on this site for any notable future items from the band.

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August 28, 2014

together PANGEA – Badillac (Music Video)

Due to yesterday’s hundred-marker mixtape, a lot of great just-released content got glossed over. Today, the amendments kick in, provided via hyperlink. There were incredible songs from Left & Right, Wishbone, The History of Apple Pie, Whirr, The Shivas, and Spray Paint. On the more visual end of the spectrum there was a hypnotic video from Literature, a lovingly-lensed performance clip from emerging artist Greylag, and a typically goofy clip from site favorites Krill. Over the past two days, though, only one could snag today’s feature spot and that honor goes to together PANGEA’s ridiculously fun, homage-heavy clip for the title track off of their excellent LP from this year, Badillac.

It’s been a while since their last music video (which, incidentally, also secured a feature spot from this site) and the only real avenue to continue featuring the band has been Watch This. Considering just how well Badillac has held up as the year’s worn on, it just didn’t seem right. Luckily, the band’s offered up a very good reason to give them another turn at bat; a note-perfect ode to classic horror films. There’s an attention to detail that helps this transcend the medium’s usual attempts at pastiche. All in all, it’s one of the more pleasant ways to spend a few minutes that’s been put forth this year- and that’s something that’ll always be next to impossible to argue against.

Watch “Badillac” here and make sure to order the record from Harvest here.