Friday Night Videos: To Kill a King
In case you missed Wednesday’s music thread, you not only missed Glyph posting every song ever recorded with the word “walk” in the title (that was genuinely impressive), but you also missed this wonderful little gem from Maribou:
I watched that thinking, “Maribou has a great track record, I’ll probably enjoy this,” and a first I did enjoy it. Then it blew me away.
It starts out with some dude I don’t know (turns out he’s Ralph Pelleymounter, which is a spectacular last name), and Emily Wood, whom I do know, and I was thinking, “Oh, this is kinda like the XX, only less… pedestrian (pun intended),” and then that dude from Bastille joined in, and then a bazillion other people joined in too, and just like that it was something completely different from what I thought it was going to be. I think everyone they’ve ever known is singing or playing an instrument there, and there’s something about large numbers of people playing music together that is just moving, period.
Of course, I went straight to the intertubes to find more of this To Kill a King, and I found this, which may be an even better song, and which has Christmas lights in the video, so it’s timely, though it doesn’t have the giant sing and play along that makes that first video so special:
Definitely better than The XX.
I hope you’re all having a wonderful holiday weekend, and I hope you’ve got some good music playin’. If’n you do, feel free to leave it down there in the comments.
Oh, I am so glad you liked it! Mostly I think of To Kill a King as “those talented guys that are friends with Bastille, THE BEST BAND EVER” but that video is just something incredibly special. I played in a community band with a bunch of retired ex-army folks for a few years, after not having picked up my horn in a decade, and the reason I went back is that playing music with many people I know is what I have instead of church. (Actually, for the longest time, it was what kept me in church – folk choir – but eventually church couldn’t be church anymore).
And this video is the closest I’ve ever seen to capturing that feeling on camera.
(I know, I know, no religion.)Report
Also, dude, the XX is like my third favorite band.Report
Just count yourself lucky that I don’t make a comment with every The XX song ever. Including concert videos (that other people took) from the concert I saw them at this summer.Report
I like The XX ok, I just feel like they’re kind of safe, you know? I mean, if one of their songs comes on Pandora — they show up on most of the stations I create — I sing along and enjoy it, but I’m not going to be like, “Oh man, you have to hear this song!!!”
Whereas I’ve sent “Howling” around already.
The XX remind me a lot of Coldplay (my phone autocorrected that to “cosplay,” which is something else entirely) in that regard. They don’t sound like Coldplay, but they occupy a similar position in my musical rolodex.Report
I think I may just be more pedestrian than you. (Which is OK, on both counts.)
Exhibits A:
I sit around making playlists like this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX9RVMC1c3o&list=PLgDqMsMnaXX2uLZUaYb0EbPAZj_xGJfqfReport
Also, there are bands that occupy that category — good but safe — that I really enjoy, so don’t mean it to be negative.
For example, Silversun Pickups.Report
Just going by what you’ve posted in comments to my posts and Glyph’s, I’d say you’re significantly less pedestrian in your musical tastes than I. Actually, I don’t think you’ve ever posted something I don’t like.Report
Meant to post this, which is perfectly safe, and perfectly awesome:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-mxBDuRaZ8&feature=youtube_gdata_playerReport
Music is awesome for a bunch of reasons, one of which is that you think SSP is safe while I put them on the edge of the Danger Zone of Distractability. Most of my listening anymore (like, oh 99.2%) is background.
I’m old.Report
My wife got briefly obsessed with “Lazy Eye” by Silversun Pickups, and had me get her the album (Carnavas).
Then she got over it really fast.
I thought it was a decent record, I haven’t heard anything else by them. It was definitely pretty Smashing Pumpkins. Listening to it right now.
Speaking of which, I threw Siamese Dream into the backyard boombox while I was working out there the other day (also, I was wearing my old holey paint-splattered purple “cartoon cow” Dino Jr. t-shirt – these two factors together were causing my wife to question what year it was).
I may have mentioned that I probably listened to that album about once a day for a year when it came out. It only rarely left the car tape deck (I’d try to listen to other stuff, but I just…had..to hear it…again), and I had a 45-minute drive to work each way every day.
There was also a memorable long road trip where it was one of the only albums we could all agree on (we were all pretty obsessed with it – surprisingly, even my friend who was otherwise a pretty-strictly-punk-and-hardcore-guy)
Anyway, the next morning I told my wife I had Siamese Dream stuck in my head, as an earworm.
She asked, which song?
I said, no, you don’t understand, not a song from the album; the whole album plays all the way through, and then starts right over again. Like it’s just one super-long song.
Which it kind of is. That thing is an album, and even something like “Disarm” (which I got mightily sick of at the time, due to the radio oversaturation) makes perfect sense within the flow of the album.Report
I had the same relationship with Siamese Dream. I listened to it constantly. This is probably why I like Silversun Pickups. They’re clearly Smashing Pumpkins fans, and their sound is thoroughly 90s.Report
HOLY CRAP BINGOBOYS!!!
I totally forgot about that song. What’s next? The KLF? The Stereo MC’s?
Well, there goes my next hour.Report
The Real McCoy? I remember the tune itself, but could not have told you that until it played (same goes for Kristine W and K7).
Technotronic had a song besides “Pump Up The Jam”?
And Crystal Waters had a song besides “100% Pure Love”?
I could do without the Savage Garden/Roxette/Ace of Base segment though. 🙂
Whatever happened to Shaggy?
Wow. This was really amazing Maribou.Report
the XX is like my third favorite band.
My friend Julius C. says they’re his 20th.Report
@chris – if you haven’t listened to SD recently, it holds up nicely, IMO. So many little ornamental details…you really can just get lost in that thing.
For a record as popular as it was, it is a deeply psychedelic one (though one that finds the surprisingly-fertile middle ground between MBV and Boston/The Guess Who.)
(Somehow that makes it even more psychedelic.)Report
This was the other SSP song I liked on Carnavas:
Report
@glyph I’m so glad someone else appreciates it.
Also, “like my third favorite band” is maribou-shorthand for “Well, they aren’t my current favorite band. And, there is probably at least one band I like better although no one is springing to mind right now. So we’ll say third-favorite-ish. That seems accurate within an order of magnitude or so.” I deeply admire your friend for having it sorted :D.
As for the playlist, Savage Garden was actually one of the two reasons I made it. The other, which is more indirect, is that a few months back, one of my friends who happens to be in her early twenties played a song for myself and a bunch of her other friends (who, very much unlike me, are also all in their mid-to-early twenties), because she wanted us to see the video because it was SO OVER THE TOP NINETIES. It was. But, like, in the way of beer commercials. So I developed a small high dudgeon on the topic and built a playlist to show her what the 90s were REALLY like, from my point of view. (The dudgeon wore off before I finished making it.)
That playlist is below (to be honest to my state of mind on starting it, I should’ve titled it “NO, it really felt like this”, but).
So, anyway, a couple of days ago, someone posted that Savage Garden song and I was instantly in a haze of flashback, and I realized that although the first playlist was true, it was also dishonest. Because there was a lot of middle-school-dances and clubbing-freshman-year-with-my-entire-dorm-floor that got left out. (For example, all the girls on my floor who wore makeup listened to The Sign and sang along loudly while they were getting ready before we went out.) So I set out to balance things.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKuFBxf3IA4&list=PLgDqMsMnaXX30mTeVGJr7mzzfxr0VfIxTReport
I listen to Gish and SD now and then. Not a lot, but at least every couple months.
Also:
Edit (stupid phone’s clipboard, meant this video):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQuBjZchzZoReport
Aw, I thought the name would make my terrible “Roman numeral” joke clear. I originally had “Augustus”, then “Octavian”, but they sounded like they could be real names of friends.
But who actually knows a Julius C.?!Report
OOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. *giggles*Report
@chris – I liked (and still like) Gish – at the time, it was the unique throwback psych record.
But I just was not prepared for the leap they took on SD. It blew my mind. Full-blown sonic addiction. They tried to one-up Ritual De Lo Habitual and Loveless in the “epic” department, and if they didn’t surpass, they certainly landed in the same neighborhood. It just sounds THICK (and yet drops down to near-silence on a dime). It’s pretty much perfect.
@maribou – someone can link “Sabotage” here every day…and I will watch it all the way through every day.Report
“And Crystal Waters had a song besides “100% Pure Love”?”
you don’t remember the video to “gypsy woman”? it is remarkably tone deaf to the plight of the homeless.
fun drinking game: the person chosen as “it” has to watch the video for “crazy” by seal all the way through without laughing or take a shot – if they do it, everyone else in the room has to take a shot.
(gypsy woman is unfair as that is baffling in its very 90s take on “artistry”)Report