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The Sam Chase & the Untraditional dropped their new music video and I’m here trying to work.

Thanks guys, I already have enough trouble with interestingly shaped clouds. Now you give me a visual of Sam, all of the visage of the bust of a roman emperor, being splattered with spaghetti, red wine and some miscellaneous charcuterie.

“I have no arms and I must drink whiskey.”

“I’ve Got Problems” opens with a scene familiar to anybody who has been alive since the 1500s. The band, clothed in white and draped in crimson chaos, is posing in the style of The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci. A painting that always reminds me of the time my art professor recanted his tale of first seeing the pre-restoration Last Supper while simultaneously having an acid flashback, culminating in him having a nervous breakdown.

This scene holds for a moment, then begins to… reravel. Playing out an epic food fight in reverse. The multitude of decorative and gastronomical carnage begins to reassert their proper origins at the dinner table, band-mates grin and wince as rogue hot-dogs fly whipping in circles amidst floating clouds of spaghetti and aggressively poured wine.

Now, where I grew up, you don’t exactly talk about religious iconography and art history

(that’s a paddlin’)

It just ain’t polite conversation. Yet The Sam Chase proves again they are no stranger to taboo subjects, boldly stepping into a visual political discourse when they dropped the video for “The Great White Noise” (the title track of the same album) in October.

The latest video marks a continuation of what’s rapidly becoming the trademark visual style for The Sam Chase & the Untraditional. Something I would liken to a casually marred minimal aesthetic. Clean, simple, almost traditional, draped with elements to suggest a palimpsest of grime, stains of mustard and ketchup, fish-sauce and whiskey.

The videos are very well produced, their latest ones clog the internet tubes with 4K resolution. They are, in my opinion, some of the most underappreciated music videos to come out of the Bay Area. I’m imagining Sam at a camera store, cowering the clerk with his signature glower until he gets all the damn pixels he damn well needs for his foodfight.

Their music and their music videos complement one another

They fit together so well that it helps me sleep at night.

They got a good vibe man. It’s like finally admitting all of your defeats to a weathered alcoholic while your cathartic tears bead upon an oaken bar. At the moment when his words begin to cascade deep into the infinite prism of your soul, at the very moment of the climax of ephiphany when you aknowledge all at once what you’ve known all long, that same wise old drunk throws up on your shoes.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, then you must. This instant.

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I’ve had the good luck to see a live performance

and hopefully you will too

If you want to see Sam’s solo performance, then check out…

To see Sam Chase and the Untraditional then you just gotta be at…

FRI 3 MARCH – Doc’s Lab – San Francisco, CA, US
FRI 10 MARCH – Squaw Valley – Olympic Valley, CA, US
SAT 11 MARCH – Crazy Horse Saloon – Nevada City, CA, US
SUN 12 MARCH – Sam Bond’s Garage – Eugene, OR, US
MON 13 MARCH – Volcanic Theater Pub – Bend, OR, US
FRI 24 MARCH – The Chapel – San Francisco, CA, US
SAT 25 MARCH – Hopmonk Tavern – Sebastopol, CA, US

At the last show I attended, I got to sing along to their cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”, albeit ironically, since I wasn’t actually born in the USA, and no, you don’t get to see my birth certificate.