New-ish Lamniformes Music Video: 'Deep Despair In Covington, KY'

Plus a Bellows tour re-cap

This week’s newsletter arrives one day late for two reasons. First, I am fresh off a short Bellows tour that ran from Thursday to Sunday with an extra morning of driving to get home on Monday. Touring involves a lot of down time, what with the long drives and liminal stretches between loading in and playing, but I’ve never once spent the time how I expect to. I packed my hard drive and laptop with every intention of editing podcasts and writing a newsletter but I didn’t take the computer out of the case until I got back home. Instead I read a good chunk of Greg Tate’s Flyboy in the Buttermilk, spent a slow day in Worchester watching The Batman, and trudged through sleet on the streets of Portland, Maine in search of a public bathroom. I’d recommend the first two activities and urge you to avoid the third if possible. So, with my usual writing days otherwise occupied I had to put off the newsletter until I had time to recoup and rest after making it back to Brooklyn.

As it so happens, this logistical reason for the delay dovetails perfectly with the second more sentimental reason. Today, March 15th, is the third anniversary of my album Sisyphean. To celebrate, I present to you the long lost music video for the song “Deep Despair In Covington, KY” directed and edited by former Lamniformes bassist Parker Langvardt:

Parker and I originally shot this video in the summer of 2019 in my apartment and the nearby streets in Sunset Park. Parker then applied his skills as a video synthesist to give it the digitally warped look that we were going for. Then after we wrapped the video sat in the vaults for years. Why the delay? Well, we both got sidetracked by other projects, tours, and global pandemics. Still, better late than never.

Moreover, it feels right to release this video on the backend of a Bellows tour. I wrote the lyrics for “Deep Despair” while on my first tour with Bellows all the way back in 2012 (!?!?!) when we barely avoided a broken car catastrophe on the drive from Mufreesboro to Covington. By the time we reached the venue we were convinced that we were cosmically screwed. We didn’t know a soul in Covington and had no idea where we would stay that night, if our car even decided to start again after the show ended. Everything turned out ok, but sitting in a diner as far from home as that tour took us in a rusted over town I felt like I was standing at the lip of an abyss, one wrong step away from being swallowed whole by the world.

Bellows also had an indirect influence on the sound of the song. Before joining the band I had no interest in Mount Eerie or The Microphones. Not out of any disdain for Phil Elverum’s work, it just wasn’t on my radar. Well, after two weeks in a Toyota Camrey with Oliver Kalb my radar was roaring with lo-fi records. While I’ve spent the most time listening to Elverum’s Clear Moon and Ocean Roar, which both got some play in the Bellows-mobile on that tour, it was Wind’s Poem and The Microphones’ Mount Eerie that had the most profound effect on my music. I’ve always had one foot in a combat boot in the world of metal and the other in a beat up sneaker in the world of indie rock. Hearing Elverum try and bridge those two on Wind’s Poem from a DIY songwriter angle inspired me to do the same from the other side of the gap. “Deep Despair” is, as best as I could accomplish, a metal song reaching to shake hands with the world of lo-fi indie. I think I did a pretty good job.

Elverum’s work came up again on this latest tour. Oliver and Frank Meadows (keys, samples, vocals, and DJ of our drive time tunes) had just caught The Microphones “reunion” show in Brooklyn before we hit the road. I won’t divulge how they felt about the show, but Elverum’s recent interest in diaristic self-reflection and self-de/re-mythologizing kept us talking for a while. I haven’t listened to The Microphones in 2020 yet so all I had to offer to the conversation was gratitude for having an old-head like Elverum still active to offer perspective and guidance to similarly inclined musicians who haven’t reached his level of acclaim and stability.

Of course, we’re no spring chickens ourselves, at least in DIY years. Case in point, in Portland we played with a local band called Felt Star who looked to be about the age we were back on that 2012 tour. Near the end of their (very good) set they snuck in a Mount Eerie cover. If Elverum was a veteran inspiration on us then jeez, he must seem like classic rock to these kids. If I were a cynic I’d maybe say something about how indie rock is stuck in the 1990s. But c’mon, it’s beautiful outside and I just got paid to play drums with my friends for four days, how could I be a cynic? I’m grateful that this music is still vital enough to have multiple generations keeping it alive. After three years of insular internet-only interaction with new bands, seeing fresh faces play new tunes in-person was revelatory. The world ain’t dead yet.

Anyway, it feels good to have this music video out in the world after languishing in the vaults for so long. Hopefully I will have fresher Lamniformes material heading your way soon. If you’d like to hear/watch that material even sooner than most, consider subscribing to this newsletter. Paid subscribers will receive all of my new tunes as soon as they are finished instead of having to wait for the rigamarole of promo and post-production.

I am 90% certain that the next entry of Drumming Upstream will be ready for next week’s newsletter, which will return us to our traditional Monday schedule. Thank you for your patience and I’ll talk to you soon.