There have been a few recent posts that have commented on (and made attempts to amend) the recent hiatus that Watch This experienced. There will be two more extended packets following this installment of the series and then Watch This will be caught back up to the current release cycle. After the last entry — the longest compilation of any kind that’s ever run on this site — nearly exhausted the finest full sessions of the past month and a half, it felt necessary to turn the attention to some more abbreviated sessions.
Now, for the sake of consistency of time, a few full sessions appear toward the end of the compilation below. There are 83 total videos in this package but, as is always the case for this extended version of Watch This, 25 performances are featured. Had they been able to fit in without repeating or more properly aligned with what this entry’s trying to accomplish (without being repeat inclusions for the artist), Charles Bradley & The Extraordinaires, Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, and Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings all had sessions that would have made the cut. That trio of clips alone should serve as a testament to the strength of this edition of the series. So, as always, sit up, adjust the volume, lean back, and Watch This.
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1. Bully (The Current) 2. Those Manic Seas (Little Elephant) 3. Potty Mouth (Bedhead Sessions) 4. Torres (Paste) 5. Eddi Front (Hooke) 6. Alabama Shakes (Paste) 7. Tacocat (WFUV) 8. Thao & The Get Down Stay Down (KCRW) 9. Seratones (WFUV) 10. Frightened Rabbit (KCRW) 11. Music Band (Jam in the Van) 12. Charles Bradley (KINK) 13. Mass Gothic (Rhapsody) 14. Greys (Exclaim!) 15. Izzy True (Don Giovanni) 16. Black Beach (Allston Pudding) 17. Erik Blood (Band In Seattle) 18. Acid Dad (Jam in the Van) 19. Suuns (Exclaim!) 20. Diarrhea Planet (Jam in the Van) 21. Parquet Courts (Rough Trade) 22. Negative Scanner (Pressure Drop) 23. Wild Powwers (Band In Seattle) 24. Burnt Palms (Pressure Drop) 25. Wimps (Band In Seattle)
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Each of the seven volumes that comprise this Watch This package contain 25 clips apiece. Due to the sheer volume of live videos that have come out during January, February, and March all of the packages will have the same introductory paragraph. Regular Watch This segments will resume on Sunday.]
It’s been a tremendous first quarter for live videos. While Watch This, Heartbreaking Bravery’s weekly series celebrating the very best of the live video format, hasn’t been in operation for roughly three full months, the information required to keep this thing humming (i.e., checking through hundreds of subscriptions and sources for outstanding new material) has been collected at regular intervals. If they were full sessions, single song performances, studio-shot, DIY captures, transcendent songs, or transcendent visual presentations, they were compiled into a massive list. 175 videos wound up making extraordinarily strong impressions, those videos will all be presented here, in the Watch This: The Best of 2016’s First Quarter extended package, one 25-clip presentation at a time.
Watch the fifth collection of those videos below.
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1. Mothers – Grateful For It (Paste) 2. Bully – Trying (KUTX) 3. Sports – Saturday (This Has Got To Stop) 4. Parquet Courts (KEXP) 5. Pinegrove – Old Friends (VHS Sessions) 6. Jason Isbell – Flagship (The Current) 7. Three Man Cannon – Mood (Little Elephant) 8. Jake Morley – Falter (BalconyTV) 9. Lady Lamb – Billions of Eyes (Audiotree) 10. Riothorse Royale – Crash and Glow (Do512) 11. Låpsley – Hurt Me (WFUV) 12. Diet Cig (WKNC) 13. Saintseneca – Such Things (KUTX) 14. Human Music – Dark Zone (Exclaim!) 15. Nectar – Change Your Mind (DZ Records) 16. Bantam Lyons (Faits Divers) 17. Cherry Cola – Bring Me to the Ground (Radio K) 18. Mass Gothic (KEXP) 19. Lithuania – 2009 (WXPN) 20. Low – Murderer (Pitchfork) 21. Soul Low – Spooky Times (Little Elephant) 22. Lucy Dacus – Direct Address (Radio K) 23. Otherkin (3voor12) 24. Soft Fangs – The Light (Fitz Ross) 25. Torres – Son, You Are No Island (Audiotree)
Once more, a lot of material has surfaced since this site’s last regular update. A few premieres are in the (very) near future, though, as are a series of recaps. A few of those — like this very piece — will be limited to March, while the others will cover the first, very rich, quarter of 2016. Since so much has amassed in that period of time, a lot of these will simply be presented as lists with hyperlinks. As much as I wish I could grant all of these individual pieces the attention they genuinely deserve, the most I can do at this point is make sure they don’t go completely unnoticed. Now that all of that’s covered, please enjoy this list of March’s finest full streams (the best approach to consumption would be to bookmark the page and explore it at will). Keep an eye on this site for a lot more in a very short span of days as it claws its way back into regular coverage.
Before diving into the particulars of the forthcoming lists, it’s worth addressing the distinction made in the headline. Each of the categories that received a list in 2015 (music videos, songs, EP’s, albums, odds and ends) will be expanded upon in this post. However, there are still two forthcoming film lists but each of those will include the honorable mentions along with the featured rankings. An obscene amount of great material came out over the 12 months that comprised the past year so any attempts to cover everything would be futile. If anyone’s exhausted the below lists, a more comprehensive version can be found by exploring the following tags: stream, full stream, EP stream, and music video. Explore some of the top tier picks that didn’t make it onto the year-end lists via the tags below.
Once again, there’s been a brief interim since the last Watch This was posted but, as ever, a lot of great material has surfaced in that time. In this volume, there will be an emphasis on full sessions and artists who have made numerous appearances on the site over its two years of existence. All five of these artists have earned glowing reviews for their live shows and are, in a lot of ways, inextricably connected to Heartbreaking Bravery’s development. Only one of these clips is a performance of a standalone song and it’s one of the most gripping live captures of the year. So, as always, sit up, wind down, focus, adjust the settings, and Watch This.
1. All Dogs (Audiotree)
Watching All Dogs‘ exposure explode in 2015 thanks to the release of their extraordinary full-length debut, Kicking Every Day, felt genuinely gratifying. The songs in that collection, like any Maryn Jones-led project, feel brave and personal. Every song is relatable to an extent that’s almost painful; our own damage is reflected in Jones’ interior grappling, which suffuses every ounce of Kicking Every Day. In a live setting, those songs gain even more impact and Audiotree expertly captures that with this very worthy session.
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2. Bully (KEXP)
One of the first shows I saw after moving into an apartment in Brooklyn was thanks to a tweet that sent me sprinting towards Rough Trade. What followed was a whirlwind set by site favorites Bully, that largely pulled from their outstanding Feels Like. KEXP recently hosted the band for an in-studio session that once again finds the band nailing the seemingly paradoxical marriage between sounding polished and downright ragged. Exhilarating and fairly composed, it’s a fascinating look at one of 2015’s most deserving success stories.
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3. Waxahatchee (Ithaca Underground)
Katie Crutchfield has been one of the most consistently enthralling songwriters of the past 10 years, elevating a staggering number of projects that have managed to find a near-reverential status among their respective communities and beyond. Eventually, that devotion spread outward and expanded into national recognition only shortly after her first collection as Waxahatchee, American Weekend, was released. Crutchfield’s released two more records under that moniker (and a few as half of Great Thunder) in the time that’s followed, with both Cerulean Salt and Ivy Tripp finding spots in numerous best-of lists at high-profile publications. Here, Ithaca Underground presents Crutchfield performing an arresting (and beautifully shot) solo set that leaves the audience speechless. It’s a powerful document of an artist who continues to find new ways to impress.
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4. Dilly Dally (KEXP)
Dilly Dally came into 2015 riding a wave of buzz surrounding the staggering brilliance of their first few singles and capitalized on those early flashes of potential with ferocious abandon. Nearly every item the band released this year wound up inspiring several paragraphs worth of attention from this site and a few extremely strong reviews for their inspired (and, frankly, inspiring) live shows. Sore, their full-length debut, just served as the cherry on top of an already-appealing sundae. KEXP recently brought the band in for a full session and they responded in kind, gifting the studio an appropriately searing performance.
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5. Saintseneca – How Many Blankets Are In The Wolrd? (ANTI-)
Throughout 2015, ANTI- has produced some of the most beautiful live clips in recent memory (a handful of which have been prominently featured in this series) and that streak continues with this beautiful presentation of Saintseneca‘s Zac Little performing “How Many Blankets Are In The World?” while walking through what appears to be a drainpipe. Easily one of the year’s most gorgeous live captures, this is both a spellbinding performance and a masterclass in composition. Even when Little’s plunged into near-complete darkness, the song itself serves as the clip’s functioning heart, generating a thoughtful overall effect. When Little finally emerges back into the light, it’s a sequence that feels oddly moving, finalizing this as one of the year’s most complete offerings in this category.
It’s been a hectic two weeks. One move to Brooklyn and nearly a dozen live reviews later, there’s barely been time to run anything other than specialty coverage. In the interim since the move, I’ve been accumulating the pieces of media that have managed to catch my attention. This particular post will be dedicated to the music videos that managed to fight their way onto my radar, with the feature falling squarely on Bully’s endearing clip for Feels Like‘s hell-raising “Trying” (and an accompanying list of every other title via a list of hyperlinks).
As mentioned above, most of the coverage has been geared towards live documentation, including a fierce in-store set from Bully, who managed to inject that same raw intensity into their latest clip. Shot in a straightforward black-and-white, the official visual representation of “Trying” manages to nicely echo the band’s very apparent 90’s influence. Utilizing a lot of shaky devices to compelling effect (the quick zoom, in particular, is utilized astoundingly well), the video’s central narrative finds an uplifting exuberance in its simplicity; Bully break into an amusement park and a pair of security guards attempt to track them down. There’s a very visible affection for the project on display throughout, exuding a very sincere giddiness that ultimately elevates “Trying” into one of the years most memorably fun videos. It’s a testament to the band’s intrinsic charisma as much as it is to their career savvy. Put simply: this isn’t something worth missing.
Watch “Trying” below and order a copy of Feels Likehere. Beneath the embed, there are links to several other videos that came out in the past two weeks that are worth watching.
Over the past few days, this site’s been running a campaign to get one of its most important cornerstones back. When the Watch This series was first brought into existence, it was done out of admiration- but also frustration. For whatever reason, great live footage never quite gets its due. Outside of rare exceptions (Scorsese’s The Last Waltz comes to mind), it’s an overlooked format. Reduced to miniature, it has an almost non-existent footprint. Yet, the very best of these clips hinge on the abilities of both filmmaker(s) and the central subject and are treasured fiercely by the people invested in either side. There’s a common ground between film and music that these clips manage to accentuate and exploit when they’re operating at their highest level, they represent multimedia formatting at its finest. Watch This was designed to amend the medium’s inexplicable reduction, Every Sunday, the installment would feature five of the strongest live clips of the week in some small effort to amend the egregious exclusion of a central focus for live footage.
Since 2015 started, like everything else, I’ve been amassing a list of some of the strongest entries in this category and this post marks the last of the trilogy making up the 15 or so weeks that made up 2015’s first quarter. There’s a heavy emphasis on interview-heavy clips and full sets, with healthy numbers for KEXP, BreakThruRadio, and Pitchfork. DIY culture is mostly fully embedded in Pupppy’s set at the endearingly named Dong Island and the whole playlist is bookended by two of the finest live videos of the year. Each of those two clips comes courtesy of NPR, with a full Sleater-Kinney set providing an exhilarating opening and a devastating Torres lullaby clip bringing the proceedings to a hushed, haunting close. Regular Watch This will resume on Sunday and continue weekly. Now, the video player below contains hours worth of material so it’s not something that’s probably going to be watched start-to-finish- but it can certainly be bookmarked and all of it is worth seeing (and, just as importantly, hearing). So, with all that mind, sit back, crank the volume, take a drink, settle in, and Watch This.
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1. Sleater-Kinney (NPR) 2. Bully – Trying (Pitchfork) 3. Mike Pace and the Child Actors (TCGS) 4. Fred Thomas (BreakThruRadio) 5. Swervedriver – Autodidact (KEXP) 6. Menace Beach (3voor12) 7. Waxahatchee – Coast to Coast (Pitchfork) 8. Literature (BreakThruRadio) 9. Fat Supper – Mind Your Head #14 (MOWNO) 10. Francisco The Man (KEXP) 11. Nots (BreakThruRadio) 12. Title Fight – Mrahc (Pitchfork) 13. White Reaper – The Cut (BreakThruRadio) 14. GRMLN – Night Racer (Amoeba) 15. Girl Band (KEXP) 16. METZ – Nervous System (Pitchfork) 17. Popstrangers (BreakThruRadio) 18. Laura Stevenson – Bells And Whistles (Space Jam Sessions) 19. Jenny Lewis – Just One of the Guys (Jimmy Kimmel Live) 20. Strand of Oaks – For Me (Amoeba) 21. Pupppy (Dong Island) 22. Krill – Foot (WKNC) 23. Museum Mouth (WKNC) 24. La Luz – Call Me In The Day (KEXP) 25. Torres – A Proper Polish Welcome (NPR)
The timing on this site’s return to regular daily coverage feels like it’s coming at a fortuitous moment. That statement? It would have held true for nearly every day of the past few months thanks to the monstrous wealth of great material that’s come out of the woodwork. A quartet of stunning videos will lead tonight’s frenzy. Between Torres’ arresting black and white clip for “Sprinter“, Lightning Bolt’s typically feral “The Metal East“, REFS’ alluring “Pain Goes Away“, and Rachel Grimes’ absolutely stunning “The Herald” (which very nearly snagged tonight’s headline by virtue of sheer artistry).
Songs, once again, showed up in full force. Punk stalwarts Timeshares continued to make massive strides with the Southern-tinged “Heavy Hangs“, The Wooden Sky provided a strong reminder of their high-level consistency with the sprawling “Maybe It’s No Secret“, and Bully returned with a vengeance via the 90’s-worship of “Trying“. Big Deal unveiled the heavily atmospheric “Veronica“, Ava Luna released the meticulously constructed “Steve Polyester“, and The Cave Children let loose the carefully calibrated- and lightly damaged- psych-pop of “Antigone“. Bent Denim’s masterfully orchestrated “City of Gardens“, Iji’s appealingly retro-leaning “Hard 2 Wait“, and Guantanamo Baywatch’s delightfully ramshackle and ridiculously catchy “Do What You Want” helped round out today’s offerings.
Topping things off was the pop-influenced post-punk of Fake Palms’ latest single, “Sun Drips”. Like Cloud Nothings, Radiator Hospital, and so many other acts before them, Fake Palms recently heightened their identity by expanding from a solo project into a full band. Along with that transition, the now-quartet signed to the increasingly impressive Buzz Records, joining a slew of site favorites in the process. “Sun Drips” suggests that the band’s ready to join their rankings by deftly combining so many great elements with a staggering effortlessness. In turns minimal and expansive, restrained and soaring, “Sun Drips” is a masterclass in shifting dynamics and an exquisite example of what makes post-punk such an appealing genre; its limitations are easy to bend towards other exhilarating sounds. It’s a track that’s defined by the levels of painstaking care that’s evidenced in Fake Palms’ craft and by the moods it manages to convey. This is a shape-shifting song that should serve as a serious warning: Fake Palms are ready to arrive.
Listen to “Sun Drips” below and keep an eye on the site for continuing coverage of Fake Palms and anything else they may have in store.
Heartbreaking Bravery 