SOUNDTRACK: SPIRITS OF THE RED CITY-“Halfway Poem” (Tiny Desk Contest Runner-Up 2015).
Last week, a Tiny Desk Contest winner was announced. This week, All Songs Considered posted ten runners up that they especially liked. And I want to draw extra attention to a couple of them.
I know very little about these bands, but I assume that this folkie collective uses this kind of instrumentation all the time, although I have to suggest that two upright basses and a viola seems excessive. The beginning of this video shows an early aborted attempt with different instruments (accordion, banjo, flute, drum and ukulele), so that sounds promising–and honestly the overload of large strings doesn’t sound bad at all in the final product.
It’s interesting that bands with lots of members are a kind of trend–it’s so impractical. And yet when done well, it’s quite lovely. And when these seven folks starts singing along near the end of the song it’s really pretty.
The story of this video is also interesting. They had planned to film their video outside. But on the day of their video shoot it was 33 degrees below zero (in Minnesota). They have some brief footage at the beginning and then the video switches to them inside a quite cozy cabin.
It’s hard to tell from just this one song what kind of folk collective Spirits of the Red City is, but I enjoyed this song quite a bit.
[READ: February 20, 2015] Axe Cop Volume 3
Axe Cop Volume 3 returns to the format of Volume 1 (the one I liked better) with a mix of shorter comics and the return of Ask Axe Cop!
The first comic we see features the return of Bat Warthog Man and features the practical science of Chemist M (whom Axe Cop buys for ten dollars). It also has a chihuahua who was a soldier that was turned into a chihuahua when the soldier’s dog bit him (Malachai’s understanding of how transformations work makes me hope he never gets bitten by anything). The dog can turn back into a man “only when I am not ready to fight…which is almost never.” There’ also a hilarious scene where Axe Cop is inside the imagination of a mouse which is in color and is “full of unicorns and cheese.”
The Ask Axe Cops are more intense in these later variations, like the one that asks if he ever got in trouble (he got in trouble with his mom when he chopped the head off a rabbit who was not following rabbit rules). We also see the introduction of head trash–a place where all the heads that axe cop has removed are disposed. There’s dating advice (very sound); a jumping competition and a hilarious bit about Halloween (where he gets 1,051 candies to share with his friends, but the bad guys have poisoned 1,040 pieces of it. There is also Axe Cop’s strangely violent generosity on Thanksgiving (yipes). (more…)
I Just Read About That... 