Watch Local Bands Perform in Willamette Week’s Office for the Second Edition of Our Morgue Sessions

If there's one thing that our recent Best New Band poll proves, it's that Portland is packed with musicians who defy genre and expectation.

To showcase the wide range of sounds coming out of this city, we created the Morgue Sessions, a series of intimate live sets from this year's Best New Band finalists. Each set was filmed in our office's morgue, the archive room where every WW issue goes to die.

The inaugural Morgue Session featured three Best New Band finalists: rappers KayelaJ and Fountaine, and post-hardcore trio Help. The second edition features this year's third and fifth place winners, hyped-up MC Karma Rivera and dark, surf rock four-piece Plastic Cactus. Watch the full session below.

Big thanks to our sponsors, Buddies and Deschutes Brewery, who both jumped on this so they could be a part of a monthly series sharing Portland's music culture with a broad new audience. Also thank you to our friends at XRAY for their music mastering genius—i.e., making a basement sound almost a good as a studio.

Related: Karma Rivera Wants to Be the Next Rapper to Take Portland Hip-Hop into the Mainstream, and She's Bringing Other Queer Artists in the Scene Along With Her

The Members of Plastic Cactus Can't Decide if Their Music Sounds More Like "Spongebob Squarepants" or a Spaghetti Western