Looking back at past Wino Wednesday posts, it’s been an egregiously long time since the last time The Hidden Hand was featured. I guess between new projects, collaborations, that new Saint Vitus album, Roadburn performances, etc., the post-Spirit Caravan trio fell by the wayside for a bit, but no more. I never got to see Spirit Caravan live (to date; one never knows), but I did catch The Hidden Hand a bunch of times, and I’ve noticed one consistent thing about their clips on the YousTube that I’d like to share with you before presenting this video of “Sunblood” from 2006.

Namely, it’s the fact that the videos — with a few rare exceptions — blow. Part of that is timing. The Hidden Hand began before streaming media took off as a mundane part of everyday life — their first album, Desensitized, came out in 2003 — and ended before it really took off, their third and final album being 2007’s The Resurrection of Whiskey Foote. There is quality live footage of them out there, mostly from the Emissions from the Monolith festival, so it’s not like it doesn’t exist at all, but they never quite hit the level where people went out and documented every move they made, and it was before the time where every move a band made was documented and uploaded for all to see. If this band was touring today, we’d have clips of Bruce Falkinburg farting in HD. There isn’t a doubt in my mind.

By my estimation, that makes The Hidden Hand something special both in the Wino catalog and in general. Living as we do in an age of increasingly prevalent and pervasive media of a variety of forms and delivered across a range of platforms, I like the thought of a band like this, led by an artist who’s by no means obscure at this point in his career despite never having broken fully into the commercial mainstream end of the music industry, being relatively obscure.

Something to keep in mind, or not, as you watch the clip of “Sunblood.” Of course, part of the reasoning behind there only being a handful of The Hidden Hand videos uploaded could also be that the band was so fucking loud they blew out everyone’s mics. That could be the issue as well.

Here’s “Sunblood,” which appeared on Divine Propaganda, filmed at the Black Cat in Washington D.C. on Dec. 29, 2006. Happy Wino Wednesday:

Tags: The Hidden Hand, Wino Wednesday

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Bootleg Theater. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.