Electric Feet, by 28 Boulevard, of Cambridge, England, contains just the right mixture of fuzz, aggressive guitars and pop bounce; also excellent are the visuals on this video. Though some of them veer sharply into “unintentional hilarity” territory aka “I may have made a tiny yeeeek! noise when the silhouettes were filled with their faces.”
Electric Feet is from Sunclouds, due out April 7, 2014, though you can listen to additional excerpts at their Soundcloud page.
Rosanne Cash & The Thread, backstage at Carolina Theater in Durham, North Carolina, with A Feather’s Not A Bird, from her new record The River & The Thread, or: the CXCW set I wasn’t quite sure was real until I clicked play.
And here, for anyone who might need it, is a little music video pep-talk: Keep On Keeping On, by Travie McCoy (Gym Class Heroes) featuring Brendon Urie (Panic! at the Disco). I am thoroughly biased by generalized affection for them both, but the video is sweet and beautifully lit and so charming I didn’t even really care that the wings bb!Travis sprouts at the end don’t really look like swan wings.
In fact the only quibble I have is that the backflip(s) that happened behind the scenes didn’t make it into the final product.
![Travie McCoy: Keep On Keeping On ft. Brendon Urie [OFFICIAL VIDEO]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4QDECwqKE0g/0.jpg)
I look forward to Two Mule Blues‘ Couch by Couch West set every year at least in part because I want to see what they are going to blow up/set on fire. Spoiler alert: it is usually a couch. But the method changes. This year they performed Old Vinyl and Innocence and I am not quite sure how they lit the couch on fire – blowtorch? – but they did.
True confession: I had regarded The Orwells with grumpy disdain for some time – possibly I listened to an off-track on a bad day, somewhere along the line – but recently I did a blind listen-test 1, and, readers, they passed.
Then yesterday I was poking around among Eddie O’Keefe’s videos and found this one, for Halloween All Year, which is a sentiment I can get behind:
The ORWELLS – Halloween All Year from Eddie O'KEEFE on Vimeo.
1 I dropped two of their tracks into the middle of a Soundcloud playlist, scrolled back to the beginning, pressed play and opened a new tab. Halfway through Who Needs You I thought Hold on, who is that, they’re pretty bad-ass, and clicked back to find out.
Against Me! has had a hot streak of startling and beautiful lyric videos lately; this one is for Black Me Out from Transgender Dysphoria Blues. Everything about it is perfect, from the font choice to the sharp angles of the cut-outs to the quick cuts to shots of Against Me! playing the song. It’s a roar of defiance combined with a bloody and toe-curling lantern slide show, and I love it.
One of the (very many) reasons I love Couch by CouchWest is it brings all sorts of awesome new-to-me bands my way, such as Ned Van Go, of Nashville. Here they are with Mountaintop Removal, proving it is totally possible to tear it up while also chilling on a couch, or keg, or speaker, as the case may be.
While we’re on the subject of notable covers, here are The Tonk Honkys of Los Angeles, CA, at CXCW, performing a version of Nine Inch Nails’ Closer that made me seal-clap with glee the first time I heard it.
I am, for the record, a long-time Nine Inch Nails fan, with a lot of feelings about that song. And this cover grows more glorious every time I listen to it.
http://youtu.be/ScO1W3Kb5m4
After that I of course had to know what they sound like when left to their own devices, so here they are with Nada Care:
http://youtu.be/1sb6sOlJC2s
Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go as sung by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. Still one of my favorite songs of all time.
i once took a train ride across Texas, which, as Texas is very large, took a very long time. I spent that ride with Infinite Jest in my lap and small group of ladies at my back. The book was a re-read, and still managed to teach me things about myself that I had not previously known; the ladies complained about how they couldn’t smoke on the train for several hundred miles. By the end I wasn’t sure if I wanted to thrown them out the window or join them for a smoke break. I was definitely more conscious of my own bad habits.
This is Drown With the Monster, by White Lung, because sometimes you have to look your vices in the eye before you drop them down a well attached to a heavy weight.
