New Video: The Surreal and Dream-like New Video for Vadaat Charigim’s “Hashiamum Shokea”

With the release of their debut effort, The World Is Well Lost, the Tel Aviv, Israel-based trio Vaadat Charigim received both national and international attention for a sound that’s heavily indebted to 80s and 90s alternative rock and to shoegaze — all while their material is sung exclusively in Hebrew. Interestingly, what wasn’t largely known outside of Tel Aviv is that Vaadat Charigim is considered one of the leaders of an Israeli rock revival, and one of the country’s preeminent indie rock acts.

The Israeli trio’s sophomore effort, Sinking as a Stone was recently released digitally and will be released on vinyl on September 18. The album is the second part of a planned “Tel Aviv trilogy”, in which the band’s material focuses on the search for meaning in a catastrophic war-torn world. Whereas their debut effort dealt directly with an actual catastrophe, the sophomore effort, which Burger Records  released Stateside and Anova Music released in Israel reportedly deals with existential boredom – the sort of boredom in which the observer is acutely aware of a moment of clarity in which they can feel time slowly passing by, and in which they are perhaps the most aware of their own self. (Interestingly, the album’s title in Hebrew literally translates to “The Boredom Sinks In.”) Each song on the album explores a variety of boredom that a young Israeli (or any young person, really) could find him or herself experience: the boredom of waiting, the boredom of trying to find love and never really finding it, the boredom of death, when you’ve seen way too much of it, the boredom of life that seems destined for endless and soulless repetition, and so on.

The album’s second single is the album closer, “Hashiamum Shokea” and it’s a moody song comprised of swirling and shimmering guitar chords, fed through gentle layers of feedback and distortion paired with a thundering and propulsive rhythm and vocals which seem to express a dizzying and wearying sense of ennui; however, what sets Sinking as a Stone‘s second single apart  is that it possesses a slow burning, art school sheen that makes the song sounds s though it were drawing from the influence of The Church, as much as it would from RIDE and Slowdive.

The recently released official video for the song was produced by the band’s drummer and according to the band, “the idea of the video was to show many people repeating pointless actions, while the lead singer calmly delivers his text about boredom and pointlessness, looking straight on through everything happening.” And in many ways, it gives the video a surreal and hauntingly dream-like logic.