Wild Flag is a Portland band made up of four women who are members of other bands — sort of the chick version of Monsters of Folk.
Front woman Carrie Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss are both veterans of Sleater-Kinney, the celebrated alternative band that went on “hiatus” five years ago. Brownstein has also received attention recently for co-writing and co-starring in Portlandia, a sketch comedy show that also features SNL-er Fred Armisen.
Everything old is destined to become new again and, Adele’s resurrection of the 60s pop sound notwithstanding, the most prevalent example these days has to be the ubiquity of the 80s New Wave sound on modern dance records.
Remember when this stuff wasn’t cool, about 15 minutes after it was? Well, now it’s as cool as it gets. I remember when Carson Daly introduced some hot upcoming band on a New Year’s Eve special a year ago, calling them “what music will sound like in the future” and my wife, after hearing 30 seconds of their performance, said “Apparently music in the future will sound like 1985.”
Next up in my series on memorable music videos from 2011 is a clip from Superchunk for their song ‘Crossed Wires.’
Unlike some of these artists, I have heard of Superchunk, though I can’t say I’ve ever heard anything by them. They came out of the same ’90s Chapel Hill music scene that produced Ben Folds Five and are notable for eschewing offers from major labels in order to record for their own company, on their own terms.
Over the next two weeks, I’ll feature some of the best videos from 2011. I don’t watch many videos so to come up with this list, I’ve leaned on Pitchfork.com, which did a year-end wrap-up.
Now, Pitchfork is a rather insufferable website, the sort of obnoxious hipster destination that posted a top 50 album list without naming more than three artists I’ve ever heard of. But their video coverage is pretty strong, including interviews with the directors of many of these clips.
Closing out my Paul Simon Weekends is another song from the excellent So Beautiful Or So What. ‘Love and Blessings’ is the album’s penultimate track and one that crept up on me, going initially unnoticed before emerging as one of my favorites.
I was working in the yard one day, listening to the album on headphones, when a line toward the end of this song struck me: “Maple trees just a little but duller than the memory of the year before.”
