If there’s a more willfully weird and gleefully enjoyable Milwaukee band working today than Scrimshaw, we haven’t found it. For the past few years, the oddball trio of singer-guitarist Robert Thomas, singer-drummer Brock Gourlie, and bassist Anton Sieger have gone against the local-music-scene grain with their lo-fi, Devo- and Ween-indebted geek-rock, tossing off ridiculously danceable songs about tiny belts (“Tiny Belt”), giant horses (“Giant Horse”), and, er, donkey venom (“Donkey Venom”). Scrimshaw is the kind of band that plays out constantly, sells its music on hand-drawn CDs, and can hardly be bothered to put together a proper website. In other words, you kind of have to be there.
Which is why it’s notable that the band has (finally) released a music video. In advance of a pair of upcoming shows (October 11 at Cactus Club with Altos; October 17 at Riverwest Public House with Heavy Hand and Rabbit Holes), Scrimshaw has teamed with Milwaukee-based filmmaker Cris Siqueira to create an appropriately goofy video for the equally goofy “Hoopula.” (From this year’s h/m+t=-h.) Shot on location in the small town of Franklinton, Louisiana by Siqueira and Micaela O’Herlihy while working on Siqueira’s Monga/Ape Girl documentary, the clip features the dancers of the Westwego Ernest J. Tassin Senior Center cutting a rug to Scrimshaw’s herky-jerky ode to the end of the world. (“This is how the world’s gonna end!” goes the chorus.) Enjoy it below, only at Milwaukee Record.