Tag: Pasty Cline

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: A Rollicking Look at a Woman Gone Wild in Visuals for Lola Kirke’s “Supposed To”

Over the course the past year, I’ve written a bit about the British-born, New York-based singer/songwriter, musician and actress Lola Kirke, and as you may recall while she may be best known for starting roles in Noah Bambauch’s Mistress America and the Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle, and a supporting role in David Fincher’s Gone Girl, Kirke is the daughter of drummer Simon Kirke, who’s had stints in 70s hit-making bands Bad Company and Free and Lorraine Kirke, the owner of Geminola, a vintage boutique known for supplying outfits for Sex and the City.

Downtown Records released Kirke’s Wyndham Garnett-produced full-length debut Heart Head West today, and the album which was tracked live to tape is a deeply personal album that the British-born, New York-based singer/songwriter, musician and actress says is “about basically everything I thought about in 2017 — time, loss, social injustice, sex, drinking, longing — essentially everything I’d talk about with a close friend for 40 minutes.” Last month, I wrote about “Sexy Song,” a slow-burning and meditative bit of honky tonk that recalls Chris Issak and Roy Orbison, but with a feminine and self-assured sultriness at its core. The album’s preceding single “Supposed To” is a rollicking and stomping country centered around an armament that features a chugging bass line, organ lines, a propulsive backbeat, and some bluesy power chords, and in some way the song recalls 50s early Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, Patsy Cline and the like but as Kirke explains the song “is really about the intense pressure I feel to be what other people think I should be and what I think I should be. How rebellious would you feel if you had spent your life just doing things that you felt that you were supposed to do? That society told you to do?”

Directed by the Lola Kirke, the video is a rollicking and boisterous look at an older woman gone wild, a woman who drinks too much, smokes too much, misbehaves, seduces younger men to rob from them and so on, essentially doing all things she isn’t supposed to — and not giving a damn one way or the other. 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Perhaps best known for his work drumming in Brooklyn-based bands like Vaura and Tombs, Charlie Schmid is stepping out from behind the drum kit, as a multi-instrumentalist and singer/songwriter of his own right with his solo recording project Del Judas. Schmid’s Del Judas debut Deity slated for a July 13, 2018 release through Primal Architecture Records, and interestingly enough, the album and its respective material is a decided change of sonic direction from his previous work; in fact, Del Judas is largely inspired by a childhood growing up listening to country music — in particular, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline and Hank Williams. As Schmid says in press notes “I fell in love with Silvertone by Chris Isaak when I was a kid. I always knew i could add to the genre and put my own stamp on this style, but I didn’t feel ready to step out from behind the drum kit until now.”

“Through the Glass” is Deity‘s latest single and while it features Azar Swan’s Zohra Atash contributing gorgeous backing vocals, the single is centered around Schmid’s Chris Isaak-like crooning, a haunting and hushed arrangement of shimmering and twangy guitars played through reverb and delay pedals, gently padded drumming and a propulsive yet unfussy bass line. As Primal Architecture’s label boss Josh Strawn, best known as a member of Azur Swan and Vaura says in press notes, Schmid’s Del Judas debut could very well be “the soundtrack for a future David Lynch film” — and while that is a fair description, I’m also reminded of the work of Daughn Gibson, who also specializes in a spectral yet contemporary take on broodingly dark country; but all of those various comparisons are linked by a sultry and vulnerable sensuality rooted in a desire to enjoy the pleasures of the present moment as a way to escape the pain and ache of the lingering ghosts of one’s past. As Schmid explains, “This record is about the eternal interplay between the sex drive and the death drive. It’s about killing yourself, figuratively and literally. It’s about parts of yourself dying off as you go through different romantic relationships in your life and the rebirth that happens through both sensual pleasure and psychic growth.”