The Garden | Heartbreaking Bravery

September 11, 2017

Versing – Call Me Out (Music Video)

The last week was a relatively quiet one for music videos but still made enough room for great clips from Caddywhompus, Lunch Ladies, Spinning Coin, The Dream Syndicate, Jeff Beam, Holy Hum, Lonely The Brave, Manchester Orchestra, Dream Wife, Swimming Tapes, Iron Chic, Carla del Forno, Elliott Brood, and Jessica Boudreaux. Joining their ranks as commendable efforts was the charmingly minimalist clip from Versing for their latest career highlight “Call Me Out”.

For a while now, Versing have been generating momentum and finding ways to accelerate it instead of opting for a route where its just sustained. Whether it’s opting for a tongue-in-cheek record name or just finding ways to improve, they seem intent on not just making a splash but staying in the water to kick up a series of waves. To that end, “Call Me Out” is a perfectly-timed release that hits all the right notes: simple, DIY, gripping, and adhering to a relatively straightforward, high-impact aesthetic while still finding enough room for a hallucinatory bent.

Directed by Daniel Salas, “Call Me Out” is little more than the band playing “Call Me Out” in a field, while simple border effects sweep in and out of the shot. It’s a clever conceit that allows the band to play up their identity and it’s elevated by everyone’s commitment to the idea. Of course, it helps that “Call Me Out” — a shoegaze-leaning basement punk ripper — is the best song from the band’s discography thus far, elevating the clip even further. When all is said and done and the clip winds to a close, it’s hard not to want to just go back and let it run from the start all over again.

Watch “Call Me Out” below and pre-order Nirvana from the band here.

September 19, 2016

Watch This: Vol. 142

From this past Monday to this just recently-ended Sunday, there were a slew of great live clips that came from the likes of Ben Seretan, Johanna Warren, Cymbals Eat Guitars, Chook Race, Ty Segall, Dog & Wolf, Daniel Lanois, Charles Bradley, Odanah, Strange Ranger, Flock of Dimes, July Talk (x2), Sleepy Kitty, Maszer, Lisa Hannigan, Half Waif, Gia Greene, The Felice Brothers, Esmé Patterson, Elvis Depressedly, Jessie Kilguss, Alaska, Ghosts I’ve Met, MUNA, Underground Rider, American Trappist, Marlon Williams, James Vincent McMorrow, Hinds, Ile, and Keaton Henson. The strength of those video, as always, is indicative of the substance contained in the five featured performances below. From old favorites to emerging artists, there’s a lot of material to explore. So, as always, sit up, lean in, crank the volume, and Watch This.

1. Teenage Fanclub – Thin Air (BBC)

For decades, certain pockets of the music world have treated Teenage Fanclub with a reverence that’s typically reserved for deities. In the time that’s elapsed since they formed in 1989, the band’s amassed a devoted following but — as this performance for BBC’s Radio 6 definitively demonstrates — they haven’t lost a step. Still boasting all of the charm in the world, “Thin Air” is a reminder of their casual timelessness.

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2. Weaves (KEXP)

Since the release of their incendiary self-titled debut earlier this year, Weaves have become a mainstay of the Watch This series. Tackling a quartet of songs here, the quartet brings their wild energy to the KEXP studios for one of the station’s best sessions of the year. As ever, the band’s a relentless force, attacking each of these songs with the conviction and tenacity that’s earned them a dedicated, steadily-increasing following.

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3. gobbinjr – Firefly (Boxfish Sessions)

A few years into a promising career, Emma Witmer — who masterminds the gobbinjr project — has been releasing delicate pop songs that sound airy but boast a substantial amount of weight. “Firefly” is a prime example and its performance here, for Cuttlefish Collective’s Boxfish Sessions, is a thing of singular beauty. With only vocals, an omnichord, and a pre-programmed drum track, “Firefly” surpasses being simply mesmerizing and winds up at a place of transcendence.

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4. Tuns – Mixed Messages + Mind Over Matter (Indie88Toronto)

Whether Tuns is a side project, a supergroup, or a curiosity is irrelevant, what’s important is that they’re writing great songs. Legendary pedigree aside, Tuns would’ve likely been turning heads. While the band’s members’ projects certainly hold a particular amount of influence over their sound (Sloan likely being the most notable of the bunch), there’s a spark here that should help the project establish their own identity. Either way, “Mixed Messages” and “Mind Over Matter” are worth celebrating.

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5. PUP (CBC)

Earlier this year, PUP released their fiery sophomore effort, The Dream Is Over. Several strides forward from their explosive debut, the record opened up their already frantic live show and sent the band’s members careening to every corner of stages the world over with wild abandon. The band recently stopped by CBC’s studios to tear through several key songs from their Polaris-nominated record — including “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will” and “DVP”, two of the year’s finest songs — and the resulting document is an exhilarating portrait of a wild-eyed band that refuses to hit the brakes.

September 26, 2015

Froth – Nothing Baby (Music Video)

While close to 50 of the past two weeks’ videos have been covered, there were still a few that managed to find an even more recent release or slip through the cracks entirely. The Garden made the most out of a brilliant concept and their two members for the endlessly entertaining “Gift“, Seahaven went the engaging live edit route for “Love to Burn“, Correatown produced a lovely low-budget gem with “Longshot“, KEN Mode kept things characteristically aggressive in “These Tight Jeans“, Silverbird offered up a weird strain of artistry in “Running“, and Boots crafted a compelling visual augmentation for the excellent “Bombs Away“. The most arresting clip of this small batch, though, was Froth‘s impressively honest video for “Nothing Baby”.

Shot on 16mm film, “Nothing Baby” is an exercise in a strange sort of artistic voyeurism that seems to share somewhat of a kinship with the Dogme 95 movement. The Riley Blakeway-directed clip centers on a day in the life of Cameron Allen, the band’s drummer, adding small injections of artistic license to an extraordinarily relatable everyday narrative. The visual aesthetic and leisurely pacing suit the band’s penchant for smoky atmospherics to perfection. There are more than a few shots that reach exquisite heights and the way Allen plays himself seems profoundly honest (which is a lot more difficult than most might imagine). Acting more as meditation than as commentary, “Nothing Baby” transfixes and stands as one of the more impressive clips in recent memory.

Watch “Nothing Baby” below and pick up a copy of Bleak here.

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August 31, 2015

OBN III’s – Let The Music (Stream)

No matter how many times 2015 seems like it’s going to inevitably taper off in terms of outstanding new material, it confronts and defies that notion with an almost extravagant flair. The start of this week’s proved to be no different, making room for strong new full-length efforts from Blank Realm, Widowspeak, August West, Woolen Men, and Findlay Brown. So Young, Dave Monks, Gardens & Villa, Pookie & the Poodlez, Air Waves, and Sharkmuffin injected life into the music video format while a variety of acts unveiled powerful new songs, including Clearance, Frankie Broyles, Slight, Zulus, Wavves, The Garden, Christian Scott (ft. Elena Pinderhughes), and Siouxsie Sioux returned after an eight year absence alongside composer Brian Reitzell with a Bond-ian torch song for the jaw-dropping series finale of Hannibal, one of the most artistically inclined shows to ever air on television.

While it was tempting to throw caution to the wind and completely subvert this site’s established pattern to analyze (and wax ecstatic about) Hannibal and its legacy, the focus of today’s post instead falls to the fiery re-emergence of a band that’s earned praise on this site before: OBN III’s. Embracing a very evident Thin Lizzy influence this time around, full stop, they’ve delivered a rough-hewn reminder of their considerable power. Easily one of the band’s most accessible songs to date, “Let The Music” is seemingly a meta showcase that underlines the band’s own songwriting approach. Even this coy, though, the band finds a moment of deeply impassioned confrontation in the repeated line of “What about my voice?” At first, it’s a question in earnest, and then it’s a surprised echo before it finally becomes a rhetorical rallying cry before it gives way to a guitar breakdown that leads into a searing solo.

Everything packaged together comes off as a unique showcase for a band that’s already earned a devoted following thanks to some relentless touring and an incredible discography. All of the band’s best qualities are in place and the band’s zeroed in on those attributes, maximizing them to startling effect. Grimy, honest, tongue-in-cheek, and unabashedly rock n’ roll, “Let The Music” is the latest in a string of loud victories for OBN III’s and bodes extremely well for the band’s forthcoming full-length, Worth A Lot of Money. A small handful of fairly astonishing tracks from the album have been revealed and with the release date now just a few weeks away, September 14’s going to be a date to remember.

Listen to “Let The Music” below and pre-order Worth A Lot of Money from 12XU ahead of its September 14 release date here.

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