EDITOR’S NOTE: This series of posts reflects back on some of the best material to be released over the past few weeks. Each post with this heading is a part of this series. After this series has concluded regular coverage will resume.
In what was a genuine outlier for this site, a piece went up tracking the extended, devastating narrative John K. Samson constructed and maintained through his work with The Weakerthans and as a solo artist. That narrative, the Virtute trilogy, came to a shattering conclusion in Samson’s most recent effort, Winter Wheat. A poignant reminder of Samson’s formidable talent, the record carries the emotive strength that’s endeared the songwriter to so many for well over a decade.
While “Virtute at Rest” may pack the hardest punch, Winter Wheat‘s absolutely loaded with gems. “Postdoc Blues”, in particular, is a characteristically insightful look into the fractured psyches that typically comprise the upper echelons of academia. There’s palpable heartbreak on display but, as always, it’s laced with an empathetic sense of hope that manages to simultaneously elevate both sides of a complicated dichotomy.
“Postdoc Blues” on its own is a remarkable work and is rightfully being lauded as one of Samson’s finest offerings but the Nathan Boey-directed animated clip takes the song to exhilarating new heights. Created for the Leap Manifesto project, “Postdoc Blues” takes on an additional impact as it’s tied to an important cause. The animation — which comes courtesy of Kevin Langdale, Kaho Yoshida, and Boey — is very direct in its interpretation, wisely opting to emphasize Samson’s narrative instead of taking a more interpretive angle.
The end result’s both comforting and endlessly fascinating, providing splashes of color that enliven every last second of “Postdoc Blues”. It’s abundantly clear that a lot of love was poured into this project and the final product, while modest, is dazzling. Simplistic, pointed, and brilliant, “Postdoc Blues” transcends its concept and winds up as one of the year’s most unexpectedly arresting clips. Give in to its charms and get lost in its attentive warmth.
Watch “Postdoc Blues” below and pick up a copy of Winter Wheat here.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This series of posts reflects back on some of the best material to be released over the past few weeks. Each post with this heading is a part of this series. After this series has concluded regular coverage will resume.
Not many bands had as much of a coming out party this as Weaves, who released one of 2016’s most extraordinary efforts in their self-titled full-length debut. One of the brightest moments of that release came via “Shithole“, a song that was originally released back in 2014. Director/editor Trevor Blumas gives the spiky, colorful basement pop number a video that keeps bandleader Jasmyn Burke in a tight one-shot, letting her face do the heavy lifting. It’s wild, it’s frenetic, it’s chaotic, it’s everything that makes Weaves tick, and it’s impossible to stop watching. Jump in and give in to its spell.
Watch “Shithole” below and pick up a copy of Weaves here.
Over the past week and a half there was a vast arsenal of material that found release across all three major formats. All of the titles that made a sizable impression will be linked to below and all of them are well worth exploring. Over the next few days there will be a laundry list of individual items to find small features but that in no way should deter from the immense value of the songs listed below. If there was enough time to provide each and every one of these entries features of their own, a regular day would have to be well over 24 hours. As it stands, the best approach is to simply bookmark this page and peruse these selections at a preferred pace. Keep an eye out for more updates from this site very soon and enjoy the incredible offerings that are available below.
Following in the visually arresting footsteps of its Away counterparts, “Call Yourself Renee” sees the band delivering their most vivid — and undeniably modern — presentation to date. Centering around two protagonists, the Bret Curry-directed (and shot) clip opts out of a literal interpretation of the lyrics and presents a slice-of-life look at the characters. It’s a decision that pays massive dividends, imbuing “Call Yourself Renee” with a subdued sense of mystery, which keeps the viewer guessing at the clip’s final destination.
Only Away, the band’s most gentle work, doesn’t deal in tidy resolutions and understands that the journey can be far more important. “Call Yourself Renee” holds true to this belief, letting its characters find a way to an ambiguous, open-ended exit point. While the two principle actors — Tyler Bates and Joy Curry — give committed performances that are difficult to shake, the band does manage to make a few appearances, grounding “Call Yourself Renee” with a sense of place that tethers everything together.
By the calmly assured ending, the clip’s firmly established a spell of its own, creating a realistic world that’s practically impossible to want to leave. Even with the visual asides that find Bates and Curry posturing for the camera, there’s a soft empathy that slowly drives “Call Yourself Renee” towards an unassuming transcendence. It’s a remarkably tender clip and a comprehensive visual realization of Away, serving as a perfect complement to the band’s most relaxed tendencies. There’s genuine moments of humanism, beauty, and confidence in every frame, leaving “Call Yourself Renee” as one of the most unexpectedly mesmerizing clips of the year.
Watch “Call Yourself Renee” below and pick up Away here.
Living Body, a new band that consists of members of Juffage, Sky Larkin, and Vessels (among others), are only a few songs into their career. Yet “Choose”, their most recent single, sounds like the work of a band that’s already released a handful of critically acclaimed records. Incredibly self-assured, remarkably confident, and spellbinding beyond reason, “Choose” is an immediately unforgettable slow-burn of a number. Gorgeous horn charts, a sneakily effective vocal melody, and a genuine sense of identity elevate “Choose” to a level of transcendence that’s incredibly uncommon for new bands to achieve.
Structure and personality in music can carry a band some distance but Living Body separate themselves from many of their peers with direct, emotionally resonant lyricism. “Choose” is the sound of a hard-learned lesson that finds bandleader Jeff T. Smith quietly repeating the mantra “get out while you can” in the song’s painfully beautiful chorus, injecting it with an air of resignation and regret. There’s a lightness to the proceedings but it’s one that’s grounded in a harshly honest reality, evoking the best works of acts like Belle & Sebastian without ever sounding like a carbon copy.
Living Body have a very distinct identity and the extent of their grasp on that aspect of their music is astonishing. There’s a deliberate nature to “Choose” that never betrays the song’s warm nuance or its ability to breathe comfortably on its own. Make no mistake, though, from the contained euphoria of the intro through to the muted, gentle close, “Choose” is consistently breathtaking. One of 2016’s loveliest moments and most promising new bands all wrapped into one irresistible package.
Listen to “Choose” below and pre-order Body Is Working here.
Following up the incredibly impressive lyric clip for “I’m Fine” and the incredibly tasteful studio clip for “It’s Not Real“, Hazel English continues an extraordinary run of videos with the gorgeous, Kate Cox-directed clip for “Control”. One of many highlights from the Never Going Home EP, the clip manages to balance retro and modern influences to sublime effect. Softly tinted and saturated, “Control” mostly just follows Hazel English’s central character through a routine day, punctuating moments of carefree joy with glimpses at a well-earned weariness.
By the end of the clip, “It’s Not Real” has managed to construct a world that seems lived-in and just out of reach, playing both to the wistful understatement that frequently defines the project’s songs and Hazel English’s own quiet assurance. It’s a small, miraculous clip dotted with some unforgettable imagery and continues to demonstrate Hazel English’s impressively tight grasp on the visual side of what’s proving to be an incredibly artistic endeavor. By the time the clip winds to a close, it’s nearly impossible to want to do anything other than direct it back to the start and let its spell deepen.
Watch “Control” below and order Never Going Homehere.
Just a short while ago, À La Mode made one hell of an introduction-at-large with the inspired “Total Doom“, a song that resonated so much it quickly made its way onto this site’s A Step Forwardcompilation. Now, that song’s received a visual accompaniment. Directed by Steph Kolbuck, the clip finds power in simplicity. Nothing more than a series of artfully-constructed close-ups (with a few two-shots thrown in for good measure) against a rotating cycle of pastel backdrops, the video manages to be a perfect complement to the song.
There’s a sense of damaged romanticism and existential dread running through “Total Doom”, as it brings a mannequin in as the romantic lead. It’s a strong statement and it fits À La Mode’s own quiet sense of strength to an absolute tee. Nearly every frame of “Total Doom” serves as some kind of mirror to the band’s identity, allowing them to clearly establish themselves at the start of what could be a very promising run. If they keep this pace up, by the time they cross the finish, just about everyone will be celebrating.
Watch “Total Doom” below and order Perfection Salad here.
Now that the songs portion of the hiatus has been covered, it’s time to move onto the next of the three major formats: music videos. This post will be the first of five dedicated features to a small handful of the best clips to be released in that specific time frame. First up: site favorite Potty Mouth and their galvanizing “Smash Hit”.
In the Jake Stark-directed clip, the trio makes their way through one of their most humongous songs to date, mugging for the camera and playing in a white room, braving excessive winds and playing through the song with a characteristic amount of conviction. There are some gorgeous shots of the band lounging that are interspersed through “Smash Hit”, which plays up the band’s inherent magnetism to an arresting degree. All three members look like they’re having the time of their life as the clip progresses, rendering it a surprisingly feel-good moment for a band that deserves as many of those as they can wrangle.
By being incredibly stylish without sacrificing an ounce of substance, “Smash Hit” also winds up staking a claim as the definitive portrait of the band, making it a quietly transcendental music video. The joy is infectious and the song’s got enough residual power to linger in listener’s memories long after it winds to its triumphant close. Potty Mouth have weathered a lot over a sterling career and it’s only made them stronger and helped them find their own definition. “Smash Hit” is the current culmination of that journey and a reason to look forward to whatever the band’s got in store for the future.
Continuing on with the precedent set by the previous post, everything here is designed to celebrate some of the best releases of the past two weeks. This time around, the emphasis falls to music videos. There’s an incredibly expansive array of material to be discovered via the links below. Click through some of the titles or bookmark this page and click through everything, there’s a very good chance a new favorite’s waiting somewhere in the wings. Enjoy.
As enticing as it was to go into detail on any of those entries listed above, this post was always going to belong to LVL UP. When Heartbreaking Bravery first started, they were the ideal example of the type of band this space was designed to celebrate. A scrappy, frequently overlooked powerhouse that earned critical acclaim and adoration in certain circles, had strong communal values, a distinctly DIY ethos, and a knack for intelligent, intuitive songwriting. The fact that they were playing basement pop — the genre that would arguably come to define this site’s coverage — almost became secondary to those other characteristics.
Less than a week and a half elapsed from the first post to be published on this site before LVL UP’s was printed. Even if that mention was only a tangential one, it was designed to posit the band as reference point for feature coverage. Before long, they became an intrinsic part of Heartbreaking Bravery’s allotted feature segments. Very few bands have appeared in that capacity at a greater volume of frequency than LVL UP have managed to attain over their past several releases. Hoodwink’d, their outstanding sophomore full-length, topped this site’s best albums of 2014 list. Three Songs, the quartet’s most recentshort-form release, ranked highly in the best EP’s of 2015 list. “Hidden Driver“, “Spirit Was“, “Pain“, and “The Closing Door“, the four songs to tease the just-released Return to Love, all earned features on their own considerable merit. With that kind of rollout campaign, a full review of Return to Love became an inevitability. Predictably, the rest of the record somehow found a way to surpass what were once thought to be unreasonably high expectations.
“Hidden Driver”, Return to Love‘s incendiary opener, sounded like it was all but ready to hurtle itself into an untested abyss when it was first unveiled. It’s an explosive work and it sets up the noticeably more aggressive nature of Return toLove, which asks a lot bigger questions than its predecessors. From the outset, Return to Love grapples with non-traditional instances of love and spirituality, something the band discussed at length in Loren DiBlasi‘s revealing MTV profilepiece that went up earlier today.
In that interview, guitarist/vocalist Dave Benton (who penned “Hidden Driver”) posited God as a feeling, rather than as an all-knowing omnipresence. So, when the unforgettable chorus of “Hidden Driver” hits, the meaning becomes slightly more clear. It’s the first instance of a slew of moments that litter Return to Love in which the band confront the spiritual realm with the kind of bold decisiveness that powers the record.
“Blur“, one of two songs to be revised from Three Songs for Return to Love, increases the velocity of the momentum and allows Mike Caridi to take over for a moment. Characteristically riff-happy and tethered to an enviable pop sensibility, “Blur” scales back from the otherworldly concerns of “Hidden Driver” to examine the minutiae of a fractured relationship and its lingering effects.
Only two songs into the record and LVL UP have already struck a delicate balance of external and internal questioning, providing an early hint that Return to Love is a record that’s defined by a commitment to exploring their own curiosity. Complementing that theme is the renewed emphasis on keys, which prove to be immensely effective and elevate the record’s frequently subdued nature, especially as Return to Love explores new musical territory.
A great example of that exploration comes in the form of the record’s third track, which turns the spotlight back to Benton. “She Sustains Us” is one of Return to Love‘s more definitive moments as it opens up the band’s sound, considerably expands their musical boundaries, establishes new tendencies, and examines the ideas of love and spirituality from a singular perspective while remaining subversive in the way those topics are typically approached. Beautiful harmonies flitter in and out of “She Sustains Us” and continues the the band’s tradition of adding compelling touches of overt femininity in their work.
The ensuing quartet of tracks constitute Return to Love‘s beating heart and have all either been revealed as part of the record’s introductory campaign or have been staples of the band’s galvanizing live sets for a year or more. “Pain” — a critical part of that run of songs and one of the record’s many standouts — sees Mike Caridi getting off some cutting asides while still managing to invoke a small semblance of lightness. The narrative of “Blur” is unapologetic in its casual brutality, wishing nothing but the worst for a person who harmed a loved one. Somehow, the spry nature of the music surrounding those biting lyrics keep the sentiment from becoming overly malicious.
There’s always been an underlying humanism and empathy to LVL UP’s work, even at its most detached. “Spirit Was”, “The Closing Door”, and “Five Men On the Ridge” all reap the benefits of that genuine, open-hearted approach which continues to stand in contrast to so many otherwise similarly-minded acts. All of those songs also ably demonstrate LVL UP’s acutely-realized atmospheric design (the plinking piano figure of “Spirit Was” being a perfect example) and their newfound heaviness (when the band comes crashing in at full force towards the start of the redesigned “The Closing Door”, the sudden impact becomes ridiculously powerful).
“Five Men on the Ridge“, easily one of Return to Love‘s heaviest numbers, transitions the record into its final run of tracks with an impressive mixture of grace and relentless intensity. It’s a song that’ll be new to just about everyone that hasn’t been fortunate enough to catch the band live but it takes on new life in the context of the record. One of bassist/vocalist Nick Corbo’s strongest contributions to date, the song finally infuses Return to Love‘s line of questioning with a well-earned sense of dread; there are likely some big questions that are better left unanswered.
Corbo immediately follows that jarring moment of bleakness with one of Return to Love‘s most meditative pieces, “Cut from the Vine”, which finds the songwriter returning to a characteristic theme: the distinctly human connection to nature. It’s something that Corbo’s explored on previous records and discussed semi-frequently in interviews (as well as casual conversation). While all of the past instances of this recurrent theme in Corbo’s songwriting have been engaging, “Cut from the Vine” is truly exceptional.
With the slow-burn of “Cut from the Vine”, the record’s final Caridi track — “I” — is positioned perfectly. Return to Love‘s penultimate number restores a sense of urgency and elevates its immediacy, recalling the band’s past work with enough panache and untethered momentum to rank as one of Return to Love‘s most exhilarating offerings. At a brisk two minutes (not counting the fascinating ambient epilogue that features drummer Greg Rutkin’s distorted ramblings about a beach), it’s the record’s shortest song and its sharpest kick, all but cementing Return to Love as one of 2016’s fiercest highlights.
All of that said — meaning every single paragraph of this feature review — nothing could’ve been adequate preparation for Return to Love‘s bruising, doom-leaning, chant-laden finale, “Naked In the River with the Creator”. Corbo takes the reigns once again and steers the focus back to nature, love, and spirituality in one fell swoop. “Naked in the River with the Creator” was one of three songs on Return to Love that was initiated by the excellent Song A Day for A Week series and its final form is astonishing.
Nearly seven and a half minutes in length, “Naked in the River with the Creator” suggests that Return to Love still hasn’t revealed the extent of the band’s ambitions. Opening with the slowest tempo of the record, somber vocals awash in a gently haunting organ figure, the effect is genuinely startling. Even more startling is when the bottom drops out and plunges the band into a quasi-nightmarish trip into a metal-informed trance that evokes a state of possession.
The latter half of “Naked in the River with the Creator”, with its repeated mantras of chants like the opening “white river, black water, gaining purpose, moving stronger, ash rising, bright father, dogs running the earth’s daughter” becomes both deeply disconcerting and oddly chilling. As directly as the band confronted spirituality throughout Return to Love, “Naked in the River with the Creator” all but exists on a different plane of existence. It’s a shocking departure from a band not typically known for taking risks and the dividends it pays are enormous, fully positioning LVL UP’s Sub Pop as not only a genre classic but as one of the legendary label’s best releases in years.
All told, Return to Love is a document of a band determined to continuously better themselves, a new career high, and a bona fide statement release from one of this generation’s most consistently exciting acts. It’s a series of sustained, connected grace notes that never wavers, even as it openly acknowledges it doesn’t have all of the answers. Not a single second of its run time is wasted and each of the songs are memorable for a wildly varying list of reasons. LVL UP aren’t the type of band to be dissuaded from taking action by a daunting challenge and Return to Love is an assured, steadfast piece of proof.
To put it as succinctly as possible: it’s a masterpiece.
Listen to Return to Love below and pick it up from Sub Pop here.
Heartbreaking Bravery 