Category: New Video

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Bells Atlas Releases Gorgeously Cinematic Yet Surreal Visuals for “Be Brave”

Over the past couple of years, I’ve written a bit about the Oakland, CA-based soul pop quintet Bells Atlas, and as you may recall, the act, which is comprised of Derek Barber (guitar) Geneva Harrison (drums, percussion, keys) Sandra Lawson-Ndu (vocals, percussion, keys) and Doug Stuart (bass, vocals, keys) specializes in a forward-thinking, kaleidoscopic, lush and difficult to pigeonhole sound that frequently incorporates elements of indie rock, R&B, Afro pop, Afrofuturism, jazz, electro pop and experimental pop. Adding to a rapidly growing profile, the Oakland-based act has opened for the likes of Hiatus Kaiyote, Badbadnotgood, Bilal, Meshell Ndegeocello, W. Kamau Bell, Angelique Kidjo and others, as well as Bermuda Triangle. the side project of Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard. Along with that, they spent 2016 as the touring band for NPR’s Snap Judgement.
“Be Brave” is the first bit of new material from the band in about a year, and  the track reveals a band that has further experimented and expanded upon their sound and songwriting. Centered around incredibly dexterous and percolating bass lines, driving percussion and Lawson-Ndu’s sultry cooing, the track shifts and morphs between time signatures and tone in a sinuous and fluid fashion. And yet the song is underpinned by a resilient, life affirming spirit that seems to say, “When the shit hits the fan, be like a shark. Keep on swimming.” As the band’s Lawson-Ndu explains in press notes, “This song, in a way, is a chant and reminder that we have our own set of super powers and a pool of instincts to lean on. I’ve had instances of loss or fear in my life that hold the kind of weight that, in those exact moments, have felt impossible to navigate out of. At times I’ve felt it’s luck that eventually pulls me out, and in other cases I’ve realized that I’m actually rarely helpless; that just by actively moving through life, I’ve collected survival tools along with a growing sense that I’m not alone. It’s often a wonder to have felt something so strongly, but to eventually make it to the other side and know that you’re ok.”

Directed by San Francisco-based filmmaker Dominic Mercurio, the recently released and cinematic visuals for “Be Brave” follows the band’s Sandra Lawson-Ndu alone in a desert landscape and out of water. After finally succumbing to extreme dehydration, she is abducted and revived by strange, fuzzy Jim Henson-like creatures that perform a ritual to revive her — with a major consequence. And while surreal and almost dreamlike, the video thematically focuses on empathy, sacrifice and communal exchange, reminding the viewer that while things seem incredibly bleak that its those deeply human traits that will win out in the end; they always do.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Live Footage: Up-and-Coming Danish Act Collider Performs “Glockster” at Tapetown Studio

With the release of “Bruno” last year, the Danish psych rock act Collider, comprised of Mikkel Fink, Marie Nyhus, Johan S. Polder, and Troels Damgaard-C quickly emerged into the national scene. Building upon a rapidly growing profile, the members of the Danish psych rock act have been playing showcases across the European Union and the States without much of an internet presence — until recently. But despite that, from what I’ve been told the band has received some attention from the likes of Rolling Stone and other internationally recognized outlets.

Now, if you’ve been frequenting this site over the past 15-18 months or so, you would have come across a couple of live sessions shot in the Aarhus, Denmark-based recording studio Tapetown Studio, and as you may recall the studio along with Sound of Aarhus started a live video series in which they invite national, regional and even internationally recognized touring bands to come into their studio. The newest installment features the aforementioned Collider, who played their latest single, the trippy and chaotic track that nods at krautrock, psych rock and space rock simultaneously while being centered around anthemic, grunge rock-like hooks.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Up-and-Coming Melbourne-based Punk Rockers Bakers Eddy Release Mischievous and Colorful Visuals for “Good Decisions”

Comprised of CJ Babbington (guitar, vocals), Ian Spagnolo (bass, vocals), Jamie Gordon (drums, vocals), and Alex Spagnolo (guitar, vocals), the up-and-coming Melbourne, Australia-based indie rock act Bakers Eddy initially formed in Wellington, New Zealand. And since their formation back in 2009, the band has made quite a name from themselves across both New Zealand’s and Australia’s punk rock scenes; not only have they opened for Gang of Youths, The Rubens and the Grammy-nominated act Highly Suspect, they’ve received airplay from Amazing Radio, praise from Pilerats and Tone Deaf. And adding to a growing profile, the band has played their homeland’s festival circuit with sets at Homegrown, Rock the Park and Going Global Music Summit — and earlier this year they made their live debut on British shores with a set at The Great Escape Festival (which they followed with some stops in Germany). 

The New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based band’s Tom Larkin-produced EP I’m Not Making Good Decisions was released earlier this year and the  EP’s latest single is 90s grunge rock, power chord bruiser “Good Decisions,” a track that the band describes as ac coming of age tale about “spending all your money on partying so you can’t pay the bills. Making silly decisions!” Unsurprisingly, the song is deeply inspired by the experience of the band’s members relocating from their native New Zealand to Melbourne where they “were all living together for the first time in a new country and probably having too much fun.”  

Directed by Fagan Wilcox, the recently released video follows a day in the life of the band, who quickly suspect that the house they live in was once a swingers pad. “There is a fully working spa bath in the middle of our hallway, you can see Jamie sleeping in it in the video.” the band says.  Throughout, there’s the sense that the band parties hard — harder than most, but the footage is grainy and damaged. And as Wilcox says “the execution was always going to have the footage destroyed. The idea was to make it raw and low budget using effects, but rather than just pop a filter on it with a VHS effect, we used pixel bending and channel blending to add an intensity to the final edit.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Free Love Releases a Mischievous Take on 120 Minutes-era MTV Videos

Since their formation under the name Happy Meals in 2014 at Glasgow, Scotland’s The Green Door Studio, best known for being the birthplace of a number of local DIY bands, including renowned acts Golden Teacher and Total Leatherette, Free Love, comprised of Suzanne Rodden and Lewis Cook quickly established themselves as one of their homeland’s most acclaimed dance pop acts, as their 2015 full-length effort Apero was nominated for Scottish Album of the Year. Adding to a growing profile, the band opened for the likes of Liars and The Flaming Lips, and played sets at festivals in Austin, TX, Moscow, and Bangalore. Despite their recent change in name, the duo further cements their reputation for utopian and somewhat brainy dance pop experiments with their dance floor friendly. shimmering, 80s synth pop and New Wave-inspired single “Synchronicity.” While the track may remind some listeners of Nu Shooz’s “I Can’t Wait,” and New Order’s “Blue Monday” and “Bizarre Love Triangle,” the song is about breaking from the binds of culturally dictated self-limitation, coupled with the vertigo of complete freedom.

Shot by Harrison Reid and Omar Aborida and edited by Gary McQuiggan, the recently released video for “Synchronicity” was filmed at Carlton Studios and features friends of the band as four different “bands” with four different backdrops. But as the band’s Lewis Cook explains to The Quietus, “I wanted it to look like a Sparks video or something like that. I like videos where it’s just a band playing. But because the track is all electronic music, it’s just us with drum machines and synthesizers. So we thought it’d be cool to do this thing you used to see in the 90s where people had clearly made a track on a sampler.” As Suzi Rodden adds, “but they’re kidding on that they’re playing all these instruments in their video. Big bass guitars and full drum kits and maracas and stuff.”
 

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Avantist’s Descend into Hell with Visuals for “this_could_be_it”

Deriving their name from a British English word that means to be an avant-gardist — one who emphasizes, practices and celebrates experimental and unorthodox methods and techniques and incorporates them into a craft, Avantist is a South Side, Chicago-based post-punk act, comprised of the Arias Brothers, Luis (drums), David (guitar), Erick (bass) and Fernando (vocals). And over the past decade, the sibling band has dedicated their live stop making avant-garde music, centered around their shared personal philosophy that art is, should and must be progressive, dynamic and unconventional, and that creativity is something to incorporate in every single aspect of one’s life. 
 
The band’s recently released EP Terasaoma finds the band stepping out of their comfort zone by forcing themselves to write, record, mix and master the EP’s material within a month, rather than the two years it took for their debut effort, and while further cementing the band’s reputation locally and regionally for crafting raucous and infectious post-punk, the EP finds the band pushing their sound and songwriting in wildly different directions; in fact, the EP’s material runs the gamut from angular and furious post-punk to soulful R&B. The EP’s latest single though is the thrashing and angular post-punk ripper “this_could_be_it,” which finds Fernando Arias howling and singing alternating lyrics in Spanish and English. May the song remind the listener that being proudly, boldly and fearlessly of color and representing everything that your heritage means in these dark, dark days is truly punk as fuck — and perhaps more so if you’re Black or of Latin descent. 

Co-directed by the members of the band and Justin Nico Flocco, the recently released video for “this_could_be_it” is on some level a tale of death, rebirth and deliverance within a brutal, unforgiving, hellish world as it follows a Sisyphean-like protagonist, who  is endlessly chased by armed soldiers that capture him, bound him and sacrifice him — repeatedly.  Adding  to the hellishness of the video, there’s a brief and fleeting suggestion that the the protagonist after a while is aware that his horrible fate is inescapable. 

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: The Bones of J.R. Jones Release Gritty Visuals for Anthemic and Bluesy Single “I See You”

With the release of  2014’s Dark Was the Yearling and 2016’s Spirit Furnace and Ones to Keep Close, the Upstate New York-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and creative mastermind behind The Bones of J.R. Jones, Jonathan Linaberry has developed a reputation for crafting gritty, garage rock and blues-tinged soul — and unsurprisingly, Linaberry’s third, Rob Niederpreum-produced Bones of J.R. Jones album Ones To Keep Close, which was released earlier this year, further cements the Upstate New York-based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist’s reputation for crafting gritty, garage rock and blues-tinged soul. The album’s latest single power chord-based inspired “I See You,” a track that is centered around rousing, arena rock-like, anthemic hooks and a stomping, down home blues stomp reminiscent of The Black Keys and others. 

Directed by Tobias Nathan, the recently released video was filmed in Brooklyn (it looks like Bushwick to me) to specifically emphasize the track’s gritty vibe. And as Linaberry say of the video’s treatment, “The idea behind this video was all about letting the music take over. We didn’t want to be overly serious or precious with the video. We just wanted the song to move people.”  The video begins by following a brother with an awesome ‘fro, smoking a cigarette as he bops along,  plays air guitar and lip syncs to the song when he encounters a small group of women, who initially are so pissed that a bottle is flung — and then they start rocking out hard. These women are rocking out so hard that they don’t notice the two men, who have been chasing each other and continue a vicious fight within feet of them.  If that doesn’t evoke old New York, I’m not sure what would. 

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Still Corners Release Gorgeously Cinematic Visuals for Shimmering and Brooding New Single

Over the course of their first three albums, 2012’s Creatures of an Hour, 2013’s Strange Pleasures and 2016’s Dead Blue, the London-based duo Still Corners, comprised of vocalist Tessa Murray and multi-instrumentalist, producer and songwriter Greg Hughes, have developed a reputation for crafting incredibly atmospheric and moody dream pop/synth pop centered around Murray’s smoky vocals and shimmering atmospherics.

Deriving its name from the sultry Texas summer days and nights and slated for an August 17, 2018 release through their own Wrecking Light label, the duo’s fourth album Slow Air was written in Austin, TX, and the album reportedly finds the band making a decided return to early form, as the band leans heavily towards arrangements that emphasize both eclectic and acoustic guitars, live drumming and a minimal use of synthesizers. Recorded in a new studio designed by Hughes, the recorded sessions inspired a minimalist and fluid approach in which they used a variety of old and new microphones while making sure that they didn’t overthink the process; in fact, they’ve managed to keep the inevitable mistakes on the album to remind the listener of the material’s emotionality — and the fact that living, breathing, feeling humans made it. Interestingly, the band recorded and mixed the album in three months, the fastest they’ve ever done, and as you’ll hear on the “Black Lagoon,” the song possesses a previously unheard urgency while retaining the shimmering and moody atmospherics that they’ve been known for. As Tessa Murray says of the album in press notes, “we wanted to hear beautiful guitar and drums and an otherworldliness, something about indefinable, along with a classic songwriting vibe. We’re always trying to get the sound we hear inside of ourselves, so we moved fast to avoid our brains getting in the way too much. The name Slow Air evokes the feel of the album to me, steady, eerie and beautiful.”

Directed and filmed by the members of Still Corners on a small handheld cinema camera, the recently released and stunningly cinematic video follows Murray and Hughes as they they travel across the deserts of Texas, Arizona and California to the ocean in a classic, white convertible Mustang.  And goddamn it, is it gorgeous.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: The Cinematic Yet Whimsical Visuals for Phantastic Ferniture’s “Gap Year”

Phantastic Ferniture is the garage rock/guitar pop side project (of sorts) of acclaimed singer/songwriter Julia Jacklin and the band features some of her closest friends, Elizabeth Hughes and Ryan K. Brennan can trace their origins to a birthday gathering in a Sydney, Australia-based bar to celebrate Jacklin’s 24th birthday. At some point a group hug manifested itself amid pinball participants with all ten of the group hug’s participants drunkenly promising to form a band together. “Only four of us remembered,” Hughes recalls. The band’s core and founding members bonded over a mutual love and appreciation for fern-related puns and leisurewear, and they would meet up whenever their individual schedules would allow, writing songs and playing smatterings of live dates to an increasingly devoted audience.

Eventually, Jacklin, Hughes and Brennan decided that Phantastic Ferniture wasn’t a side project, and they should focus on writing and recording an album together, centered around the fact that the band would be a lot more spontaneous and less technical than their individual. “That was the fun part,” Jacklin says in press notes. “Ryan never played drums in bands, Liz had never been a lead guitarist, Tom didn’t play bass and I’d never just sung before.” Hughes adds “We wanted a low level of expertise, because a lot of good music comes from people whose passion exceeds their skill.”

Slated for a July 27, 2018 release through Transgressive Records, Phantastic Ferniture’s self-titled debut finds the band adopting a mantra of not overthinking — of focusing on the urgency of the moment, while being whimsical. “Gap Year,” the second single off the band’s full-length debut is a 90s alt rock-like track that to my ears reminds me a little bit of early PJ Harvey as the rollicking and expansive track is centered around buzzing power chords, a propulsive rhythm section and a soaring hook — and in some way, the track may inspire some listeners to loosen up and venture off someplace to experience and see things, and to discover themselves. But as the band’s Elizabeth Hughes says about the song, “This song is about just doing what you need to do, with no expectation of any kind of return. It’s about trusting your instincts and not seeking validation …Julia and I are performing our hearts out to absolutely no one at one …The lack of audience doesn’t dull our enthusiasm, and we know our companionship and community will be enough of a reward. It’s poignant because we grew up in the mountains, both desperate for a stage.”

Directed by Nick Mckk and Phantastic Ferniture, the recently released and incredibly cinematic visuals for the song features the band’s Jacklin and Hughes performing an dancing and while not seeming desperate for an audience and for a stage, the viewer will immediately pick up on the isolation of their surroundings, and the companionship that the duo has.
 

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Russian Baths Release an Uncomfortably Intimate Visual for “Poolhouse”

Over the past few months,  I’ve written a bit about the Brooklyn-based indie rock quartet Russian Baths, and as you may recall, with the release of their  debut single “Ambulance,” the band comprised of  Luke Koz, Jess Ress, Evan Gill Smith and Jeff Widner, quickly received attention for a sound that the band has said nods at Big Black, 70s space rock, Big Muff and British post punk among others; however, “Slenderman,” the first single off Penance, which was released earlier this year, nodded at brooding, 120 Minutes-era MTV alternative rock, as the song featured the familiar alternating quiet, loud, quiet song structure and rousingly anthemic hooks while “What’s In Your Basement”  was an mosh-pit worthy song that nodded at Bleach and In Utero-era Nirvana and Finelines-era My Vitriol.

Interestingly, “Poolhouse,” Penance‘s latest single is an expansive, shoegazer rock-like song that manages to bring Sonic Youth to mind, as the band employs the use of jangling dissonance to create a an eerily gorgeous song that feels immense and downright oceanic. As the members of the band explain, “‘Poolhouse’ is about an existential crisis. It’s about feeling so overwhelmed that you can’t see the way out. It’s about moments of clam and hope being submerged in waves of pressure. It’s about losing your breath because of fear.” 

 Shot in an uncomfortably intimate close up that features the band’s frontwoman Jess Ress as she’s doused in continuous steams of water, the recently released video for “Poolhouse” evokes of submersion that the song focuses in, with the video’s protagonist struggling to keep calm. 

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Introducing the Genre Defying Globalist Sounds of Ekiti Sound

Leke a.k.a CHif is a Lagos -born, London-based multi-instrumentalist, producer and singer/songwriter, who has carefully honed his skills with a variety of artists and producers both in Europe and Africa, and briefly as a sound designer in Nollywood — and unsurprisingly, all of Leke’s experiences have influenced his solo recording project Ekiti Sound, a project that finds him adding his name to a growing list of genre-blurring artists that draw from an eclectic array of sources — while being undeniably Nigerian; in fact,  the slickly produced “Ife,” Leke’s latest single off his forthcoming Ekiti Sound debut Abe No Vex pairs thumping tweeter and woofer rocking Chicago house music, African polyrhythm, arpeggiated synths and an anthemic, club rocking hook with shouted traditional lyrics by frequent collaborator Prince G, creating a seamless (but incredibly subtle) synthesis across the African Diaspora. As Leke explains “Ife” in Yoruba means “the greatest love,” and the swaggering club banger manages to gently swoon a bit at its core, as it promotes the sort of love that should unify all creatures on this planet.

Directed by Sam Campbell, the recently released video for “Ife,” was shot on location in Ikeja, the capital of Lagos State and features three beautiful. traditional Nigerian dancers, who do some of the traditional dances of the Yoruba, Ibo and Hausa tribes with an infectious and life affirming energy.