The Coathangers Make It Right
Hey! Just like every year, I’m here to say that I’m gonna pick this blog up and make it work! Hey! I mean it this time! Hey! I don’t have time to post much, but here’s some stuff that’s really killing me!
And, what’s killing me at this second is a band called The Coathangers from Atlanta, Georgia. Their new album, Nosebleed Weekend, is a stone-cold punk rock classic, a living, breathing, raging articulation of the form. I saw them live last week at The Trumpet Blossom Cafe here in Iowa City, and they made me jump up and down. I’d like to write about them, but I really don’t have anything particularly deep to say, so I’m just gonna collect some videos here and let them speak for themselves.
Produced Cuts from Nosebleed Weekend:
Watch Your Back
Down, Down, Down
Follow Me
Nosebleed Weekend
That last one has the most fake blood I’ve seen in a video since Ice Balls by Birdcloud.
Here’s some live in-studio performance cuts, also from the new record:
Make It Right
Perfume
I Don’t Think So
Squeek Tiki
In all of this, I’m struck by the succinct songcraft and the way that the material feels like an extension of them expressing something about themselves and opens up lots of space for any of us to express our own selves through it. That’s a much harder trick to pull off than it might seem. And they do this terribly liberating work within the tight borders of an aesthetic that is, but never seems, deeply and rigidly historically rooted, making a genre record that completely blows the doors off the genre and sends it screaming down the road. That’s another hard trick to pull off. What do you think?
No Radio Free Lunch! 