Considering that I did a little barbershop quartet in my day (thanks in part to my role as Harold Hill in RULH High School’s production of The Music Man), I’m inclined to say that a capella groups are a little less lame than most.

I get that seeing a few dapper young lads wearing spats and armbands standing in a semi-circle while chirping their hearts out to ragtime and doo wop standards doesn’t get everyone’s blood pumping. Rockapella isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, after all.

It looks like the Carleton Singing Knights are trying to not repel chicks, though. These gents are blazing the hot jams, bopping to cool-kid-approved songs from the likes of Grizzly Bear, Flight of the Conchords, My Morning Jacket, MGMT, Daft Punk (the Daft Hands kid goes to the same college, oddly enough), Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Sufjan Stevens, New Pornographers and Jeff Buckley among others. And they’re doing a freaking awesome job of it, too!

I’ve seen a few folks talking about these boys on the webs, but the Carleton Singing Knights really need to be on everyone’s radar. Let’s hope that happens.

7 Responses to “Carleton Singing Knights Make A Capella Cool Again”

1. On 07/10/09 12:24 PM, Bobby said:

   

   That’s just Fan-Freakin’-tastic. that’s so good it shoulda been mine.

2. On 07/10/09 2:48 PM, Jeffrey Smith said:

   

   HAHA!! Way to not give me credit for finding them Sean!!

3. On 07/12/09 4:01 PM, Don Gaines said:

   

   wowzers, that was pretty dope. i went to a church of christ school where it was all a capella all the time and it was never this cool. maybe if we’d had songs like this in chapel i wouldn’t have slept through it.

4. On 07/12/09 9:23 PM, Matthew C. Jenkins said:

   

   This is awesome. Don, I feel your pain. I grew up in a non-instrumental church of Christ. Did you go to Harding?

5. On 07/13/09 11:59 PM, ryan. said:

   

   Harding! don and i both went to harding. what a…..thing, harding is.
   .
   chapel wasn’t so bad, but to be fair, i was stoned for most the last year, which will make a few thousand CofC kids singing ancient a capella hymns much more entertaining.
   .
   consequently harding and CofC does leave a soft spot in my heart for non-instrumental music. so this is wonderful. wasn’t there a cd released of indie artists doing their songs a capella a few years ago? i remember pedro the lion having a song and damien jurado nailing ‘dance hall places.’

6. On 07/14/09 12:02 AM, ryan. said:

   

   also, i was at the dentist the other day (i’m in charleston, sc at the moment) talking about grad school, when the hygienist asked me about where i did my undergrad work. i was in the middle of giving my usual ‘a small, dinky christian school in nowhere, arkansas’ spiel, when the dentist in-training on the other side of the cubicle wall said ‘harding’s a great school!’. small world.

7. On 07/14/09 12:50 AM, Anna said:

   

   Wow Andrew Bird, MGMT, the Beatles, Flight of the Concords, Grizzly Bear, Beruit, Postal Service, The New Pornographers, somebody there has a GREAT taste in music. This is actually kind of cool. I’ve never seen a cappella before. Its like a more musical version of beatboxing. This is really cool! Its kind of odd when those people start dancing though. Nice.

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