Milwaukee Record is proud to present Public Domain. The video series features Milwaukee musicians setting up at Colectivo Coffee to adapt some of the world’s best-known songs in ways they’ve never been heard before. Watch the entire series here.

For this installment, Direct Hit! dropped by Colectivo’s Humboldt Blvd. Cafe & Roastery to perform a lively adaptation of an apocalyptic 18th century hymn that would’ve been a perfect fit on the band’s 2013 pop-punk opera, Brainless God. The Fat Wreck Chords quartet hopped the “Employees Only” barricade to take a stab at William Cowper’s 1779 hymn, “There Is A Fountain Filled With Blood,” which the English poet is said to have written after a bout of depression.

Though the bleak hymn has survived centuries, it’s actually something of a deep cut in Cowper’s catalog, as the misunderstood writer is responsible for the phrases “God moves in mysterious ways” and “variety is the very spice of life,” in addition to penning early abolitionist works that were routinely quoted by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. nearly 200 years after they were written.

The video was shot, recorded, and edited by Cheston Van Huss of Effigy Media (with additional camera support by Michael Swan and our own Josh Hoppert). Travis Whitty produced the opening sequence. Public Domain is sponsored by Colectivo Coffee Roasters, Transfer Pizzeria Café, and WMSE.