Our Friends Introduced Us To This Wonderful Band

by Eric Spiegelman

A few months ago, Awl Music switched over to a new kind of curation. (Yes, sorry, “curation.” You know: choosing videos.) Instead of picking videos one at a time, by hand (by mouse?) we started picking shows from YouTube and Vimeo, and set the site up to automatically post new episodes from the shows that we like. Right now there are 8 shows that get fed into the stream: La Blogotheque, a live music series produced by the French music website of the same name; Beat Making Lab, a PBS Digital Studios program in which some guys introduce a compact electronic music studio to various cultures around the world; We Have Signal, a wonderful live music series produced by Alabama Public Television; Wreckroom, a live music series filmed in Adrian Grenier’s basement; Enjoykin, a super weird but usually enjoyable Russian YouTuber, who will be the first hire when BuzzFeeᴅ expands to Minsk; All of the shows from VFiles, including What The F*shion, the best show on YouTube; All of the videos posted to the Oddfuture YouTube channel; and, starting I think, like, now, Chronic Gamer Girl. This works great on-site, but is also really delightful to follow on Tumblr.

So it’s basically like when they replaced Kennedy on MTV with an eight-disc CD changer machine — but better, because it’s like the CD changer is a bunch of different smart people that we like making their own choices. Anyway. This new system has just been bubbling along on its own for a while, and this morning this video showed up.

It’s a live performance from a band called Houndmouth. I’d never heard of them before. They’re delightful. How have we missed them? They’re on Rough Trade, and they did Letterman this year — and they are, apparently, currently on tour. The first song they play starts at 1:17, if you want to skip the intro, which you probably do, because playing four hundred hours of Candy Crush this summer obliterated whatever shreds of attention span you had left.

Eric Spiegelman is a web producer in Los Angeles and the proprietor of Awl Music.