The Fatty Acids take New York!

If you think the current and never-ending winter chill has stifled Milwaukee’s creative spirit, think again. With only one month of 2014 in the books, Milwaukee bands have managed to crank out a handful of charming, creative, and occasionally zany music videos. Just today, the ever-tireless Fatty Acids unveiled a clip for “Worst Part,” from their excellent 2013 album Boléro. (If you’ve ever wanted to see a curiously dressed dude dancing to The Fatty Acids and freaking out otherwise unflappable New Yorkers, now’s your chance.) In honor of the Fatties’ new video, we rounded up five more local clips that bode well for the year ahead.

The Fatty Acids, “Worst Part”

The Fatty Acids have always been known for their high-production, batshit-insane videos. But the group goes lo-fi for “Worst Part,” enlisting a friend to dance, boogie, and generally squirrel out in the streets and subways of New York City. With echoes of Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You,” the video for “Worst Part” gets a lot out of a little, and provides just the right amount of dancing wackiness to one of the Fatties’ catchiest songs.

If city hall ever gets around to establishing a Mayor’s Award for Busiest Milwaukee Musician (get on that, Barrett), you’d be hard pressed to find a better candidate than Myles Coyne. In addition to fronting his own band, Coyne lends his talents to seemingly 8,000 other local groups, including Temple and Animals In Human Attire. The video for “The Windy City” (a track from last year’s Take Things As They Come) finds Coyne and his Rusty Nickel Band taking a break from their fall 2013 tour and performing live in the Little Elephant studios in Toledo, Ohio. In keeping with Coyne’s live performances, the video is filled with an infectious, easygoing charm that’s impossible to ignore—just try and stifle a grin for the song’s delightfully giddy two-and-a-half minutes.

The Delphines, “Feral”

Filmed live at Circle-A by musician and photographer Joe Kirschling, the video for The Delphines’ appropriately titled “Feral” is notable for a few reasons: it looks great, it sounds even better, and it gives you a rough approximation of how the dauntingly small and easily packed Circle-A can feel like an overcrowded sardine can. Kudos to Kirschling and the band on making it out alive.

Klassik, “Boogie”

Okay, so this video was released last November, but we’d be remiss not to include it. Put simply, the clip for “Boogie” encapsulates everything that makes Klassik great: an undeniable charisma, an effortless style, and a confident and well-worn swagger. (This is a guy who named his 2013 LP Young Rising Phenom, after all.) “Boogie” is built around “Blame It On The Boogie” by, as Klassik puts it, a “young Michael Jack…son,” but that’s not all the video borrows from MJ. The tux-and-bowtie-in-front-of-a-brick-wall look is straight from the cover of Off The Wall, and the final few seconds include a visual shout-out to “The Way You Make Me Feel.”

Sat. Nite Duets, “Last Summer”

With Wisconsin temperatures continually hovering around the “warm-part-of-Mars” mark, there’s no better time to enjoy Sat. Nite Duet’s video for “Last Summer.”  The song comes from last year’s excellent Electric Manland, and contains the sort of effortless, bittersweet refrain (“In the long run / it’s already long gone”) that the band excels at. “Last Summer” is a relatively tame and subdued video by Sat. Nite Duets’ standards—there’s not a chainsaw-wielding tiger to be found—but watching the band frolic in the grass and generally fuck around has its charms, too.

Ugly Brothers, “In The Park”

It takes a lot of nerve for a band to get on stage and play in front of an audience; it takes a different kind of nerve to set up your gear in Lake Park and play for whoever happens to be walking by. Breadking-associated folk band Ugly Brothers throw caution to the wind and do just that in this simple, amiable clip shot last fall. Finding the sweet spot between Jonathan Richman and the “Hey!” neo-folk of The Lumineers, the band turns in a winning performance that never crosses over into “too-cute” territory. And yes, that’s Myles Coyne in the upper left. Get this man an award already!