The first 1:15 of this video is a Southern religious musical style called shape note singing, which is new to me despite the fact I'm decidedly from the Bible Belt. But then, our folks were Southern Baptists with their piano-based Broadman Hymnal or Catholic with the organ-based music typically associated with the Catholic Church, I never wandered over to the Church of Christ or one of the various "primitive" churches, it would have never occurred to me that there was an a capella religious music tradition out there that I was missing.
The remainder of the video is one of those "shape note" religious songs set to a punk rock musical backing, but it works much better than it sounds.
This is the band Cordelia's Dad in their mid 1990's configuration. The bald dude is Tim Eriksen, a music historian better known as the music consultant for the movie Cold Mountain. The skinny kid on the right is actually a girl, that's a very young and slender Cath Oss (now known as Cath Tyler who makes music with her English-born husband Phil Tyler and not being so young and slender anymore, sigh, but she still has some pipes on her). The guy with glasses behind the drums is Peter Irvine. I have no idea what albums the two songs in this live video were on, if you're interested in further exploring this interesting fusion of musical traditions you'll need to do that detective work yourself. I just found this particular video oddly compelling for reasons probably not of any interest to you.
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
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