I always appreciate a good stop-motion video, and this one, for Winter Heart by Bethany Weimers, is especially delicious. The best part: she and her artist partner Merlin Porter created it with sets they built themselves, in their living room, and a borrowed camera.
The final result is wistful, whimsical, and really quite lovely. I’ve watched it twice and I already feel a little less Grinchy about both snow and Valentine’s Day.
![Bethany Weimers - Winter Heart [OFFICIAL VIDEO]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/jvf_SKOE1hQ/0.jpg)
After many years playing drums and producing with Boukman Eksperyans, the Haitian roots music group founded by his family, T’dòz (Ted G. Beaubrun) is striking out on his own. This is the video for Ogou from Lâcher Prise (“Letting Go”), his first solo record. The song is a call to Ogou, the spirit of fire and strength, and both it and the video are beautiful.
![T'doz - Ogou [CLIP OFFICIEL]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/eRw-pKg-ayg/0.jpg)
For My Own is the first release from New London Fire‘s upcoming record Echoes in the Dark. Stylistically it picks up where The Dirt The Blood The Faith left off – Americana leavened with an indie rock sensibility – though tonally it’s a little darker. The first two times I listened to it I thought it was a mournful meditation on a lost relationship, the third time through I was like . . . hold on, is this a murder two-step?
Not a lot happens in the video, and I mean that literally, it’s a little under three and a half minutes of home-movie style footage of what appears to be the back of a dude sitting on a wooded hill and staring at a lake. I spent a little bit of time wondering which lake – Central Park? one in Jersey? Upstate? – before deciding that ultimately it doesn’t matter. The anonymous lake is a metaphor, for the time the lovelorn spend with their attention turned inwards. Or else it’s where the narrator dumped the body.
Well, whatever the lake means, or doesn’t, I definitely want to hear the rest of the record, and the story.
This is the video for Breathe Your Last, by Jameson (Jameson Burt), from his new EP Carnivore.
It considers, visually, the battle between artist – writer, in this case – and demons, and artist and self, and contains some weird Fight Club-style bloody violence and Blair Witch-style shaky footage of one man’s mind coming apart at the seams. There is one extended scene with words melting off a blackboard that is seriously the stuff of nightmares for anyone who keeps little piles of scribbled chunks of story and notes-to-self laying around. On the plus side: our hero does climb out of the nightmare pit at the end and presumably lives to fight (and scribble) another day.
Some thoughts about Carnivore as a whole: I’ve been listening to it on loop for the last couple of days, and it is the kind of record that 1) will stand up to that kind of test – I have yet to get bored with it and 2) blooms under that kind of scrutiny. Breathe Your Last has a distinctly Americana sound, but the rest of the songs don’t really; they shimmy all over the indie rock spectrum, borrowing from a variety of genres including art rock (for lack of a better term), world music, and whatever we’re calling what Don Henley was doing in the early ’80s.
You can listen to more of it at his Soundcloud, but I’m especially fond of Liar:
Nahko and Medicine for the People, led by Nahko Bear, are from Portland, Oregon, and are less a band and more an artistic collective that happens to play music. Really, really good music, that you could wedge into any number of genres, including world music, indie rock and inspirational. I came across them the other night when I fell in (yet another) Soundcloud hole, and I am very glad I did.
This is the video for Budding Trees, from Dark as Night, which at this juncture is my favorite song of theirs, and I think it also serves as a good introduction to the band and their wider community, because it literally is the band and the community singing together. Not a show, however; they’ve used a broad assortment of footage, some amateur, some probably not, to show the tune winding through different lives.
And this is Nahko Bear all by himself, doing their most recent single Wash It Away as part of a Gondola Session:
Speaking of Soundcloud: This is their page, and you should go and just listen to the whole thing.
Here is nearly 15 minutes of some of the best dirty obnoxious rock and roll out there: The Orwells, playing some highlights from Disgraceland between interview segments, live on KEXP.
http://youtu.be/RrWitGAZjWo
Enjoy your Thursday / Thanksgiving, NTSIBBers.
This video for This Old Banjo by J. Tex and the Volunteers of Copenhagen, Denmark, is a masterful piece of minimalism – it’s just him and a guitar – and it feels, for lack of a better term, organic. Unfussy, unforced, like he’s just walking around thinking with his guitar. The only thing that could have made it better would be the appearance of an actual banjo.
In honor of Michael Hutchence, who left us much too soon, and 17 years ago today: the video for Need You Tonight, by INXS, one that I watched every time it came up on MTV – which was a lot – and showcases him (them) at his finest.
And, also, okay, yes, I totally had a middle-school crush on Michael Hutchence, fueled by this song, and this video. It was specific, but yet also somehow abstract; I was, I think, daydreaming of someone sidling up to me and informing me I was his kind. If that someone was as smoking hot as Michael Hutchence, all the better.
http://youtu.be/p9EsYnjFYTQ
It’s a simple yet sublime pleasure, and just thinking about it can make you feel a little calmer, a little more content. Imagine: You bring out one of the good rocks glasses (or your favorite mug or a special occasion tea cup) and pour a couple fingers of amber liquid (or something dark and strong or just some whole milk). You drop the needle on the jazz platter (or pull up a blues album on your mp3 player or dig out that mixtape from college). Ensconcing yourself in the coziest seat in the house, you crack the spine on a classic (or find your place in that sci-fi paperback or pull up a biography on your e-book reader). And then, you go away for a while. Ah, bliss.
In this series, some of NTSIB’s friends share beloved albums, books and drinks to recommend or inspire.
For anyone who missed it earlier this month, Militia Vox recently released an all-covers album called Bait. On it she takes aim – with amazing results – at a number of hard rock icons, including Ozzy Osbourne. This is her take on PJ Harvey’s Rid Of Me:
And now, I will turn the floor over to her, to tell us about her favorite book, record and drink:
A GOOD READ:
I’m a sucker for dark poetry, Edgar Allan Poe being my ultimate fave. It’s too difficult to limit this answer to one story, an artist needs to be looked at by the entire scope of their work to truly feel them. I have quite a collection of Poe- both short stories and poems- in various editions and bindings. I have visited his grave just outside my hometown in Baltimore, Maryland since I was in 4th grade. I’ve regularly brought flowers to his gravesite since then. He is my muse. I also enjoy confessional poetry- Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Dorothy Parker… I love the witty and bitter, double edged quality of it all.
A GOOD LISTEN:
The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails will always and forever hold the crown for me. It’s sonic perfection, sex, love, angst and beauty. I remember buying it on the day it came out, running home and throwing in on my stereo and hearing that first sample of a guy getting whipped repeatedly and moaning, and then ripping into the opening track Mr. Self Destruct. I vividly remember my best friend at the time and I standing there in my room, in shock, with our jaws on the floor taking in this brutal eargasm. It was the most erotic thing our little suburban preteen ears had ever been exposed to. Still to this day, it’s a musical beast of an album. I highly recommend getting a good pair of headphones and taking it all in for yourself sometime. Oh, and have some tissues or a _ _ _ rag close by.
A GOOD DRINK:
I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you about this beverage, because it’s not everyday that I get a drink named after me… My comrades at Coldcock Whiskey gave me a specialty drink to commemorate my residency at Times Scare in Times Square NYC and my album release of “BAIT” on Halloween. It’s called “Militia’s Macabre.” And it goes like this… Coldcock Whiskey, apple cider, simple syrup, lemon juice and a dash of cinnamon. Perfect for autumnal late nights and witchy winter times. Militious and delicious.
I touched on this briefly back in August, but: Frank Iero (Death Spells, Leathermouth, My Chemical Romance) and his new band (frnkiero andthe cellabration) have recently released a record, called Stomachaches.
My feelings, the short version:
It’s awesome and I love it. I return to it when I am feeling abraded by life, and wish to use Iero’s voice as a honey-and-gravel blanket. Or when I want to shuffle dance on street corners. Whatever you may have thought of My Chem: if you like vigorous punk rock with fuzzy accents and the occasional delicate melody, give this a shot.
My feelings, the long version:
I’ve been listening to this and Gerard Way’s Hesitant Alien as point-counterpoint, and while I like what Gerard Way has been up to – more on that later – Iero’s work is more musically interesting to me. I find I’m re-listening to songs not only because they feel like they fall directly into a pre-cut groove in my head and heart but because I’m actively trying to track what he’s doing with feedback and drums and/or listen more closely to the lyrics. Basically, I’m super into the way he’s playing with elements of dissonance in the context of pop-inflected punk while exploring themes of loneliness, alienation and the sometimes weird ways people express affection.
And now, some highlights:
All I Want Is Nothing: the first ten seconds or so sound like a band lurching to life, and then the song kicks into (high) gear. After a long, silent summer, this was a welcome burst of aggressive noise.
She’s The Prettiest Girl At The Party And She Can Prove It With A Solid Right Hook: a prime example of a delicate melody. It’s a little slower and more reflective than some of the other songs, more, dare I say it, grown-up. But I mainly I love it for the way the soft, gleaming melody gets showcased at the beginning and then runs through the whole song like a bright ribbon.
Where Do We Belong? Anywhere But Here.: the last song on the record, which starts out stripped down and halfway through falls off a cliff made of surging guitars and ogre roar. I am a big fan of both of those things.
In conclusion: A++, looking forward to whatever he/they do next.
