MOFGY – Whoop-De-Doo
Similar artists: SlobHeads, PLAY DEAD, Dread FM, Baby Dave
Genre: Folk rock
The world is short on any great villains. Even the billionaire emerald-mine owners are a parody of evil and more aking to desperate weeping babies. All this considered, how are we to have any great heroes either? It’d be even trickier to depend on the rarest of examples, deeply flawed individuals who straddle the line between heroism and depravity.
MOFGY are here to help, and they’re willing to torch your house down for their beliefs. But they might do it for just a good time, too. If it all sounds a bit extreme, good. The music landscape mimics the world and it too needs heroes, villains and anybody that can help us out of our depressing lull with a joke, a threat or a smack outside the head.
MOFGY’s “Whoop-De-Doo” is a brilliantly sinister folk-rock song – a colourful clown car filled to the brim with maniacs wielding clubs. Is this a song for the common man or an anthem of hatred? Maybe a bit of both. Most importantly, it doesn’t sound too laboured over or like it is made by the sorts of people that will bore you to tears. This makes it a rarity. If our yearly Summer riots could only guarantee to be this entertaining?
Nathaniel Bellows – Well Water (feat. Shara Nova)
Similar artists: Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen
Genre: Indie Folk, Folk
The truth doesn’t sell well anymore. It’s not very glamorous and, well, not very believable. News broadcasters figured this out first. In the same way that Hollywood manufactured stars, they manufactured stories where the truth is only occasionally welcomed. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t people still looking around.
What will it sound like when they find it? There probably won’t be a lot of whistles and bells to announce its arrival. It won’t cause a huge sensation as a whole, with all the people overly entertained by the alternative. And, it’ll be undeniable to anyone who will listen.
There’s a quality that great acoustic guitar-based folk music possesses. It can do a lot of work, show a lot of things, and tell the truth without needing to make a spectacle of itself.
Nathaniel Bellows’ “Well Water,” a song featuring Shara Nova, is a modern-day spiritual, a folk song using heartbreak, distress and spiritual scepticism as its fuel. Its vocals are clean, direct and memorable. Yeah, there’s truth in those words, and it’ll stay that way regardless of whether any of us is willing to accept it or not.