Tag: Ratatat

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: KUNZITE’S Hallucinogenic and Playful Visual for Euphoric “LEMON SWAYZE”

KUNZITE — RATATTAT‘s Mike Stroud and Abuela’s Agustin White — can trace their origins to each of the project’s individual members occasionally crossing each others paths while admiring each other’s work: When Stroud was busy touring with RATATAT, White went on a spiritual journey that found him exploring yoga, meditation and psychedelics. Throughout their friendship, the duo had been looking to do something together — and KUNZITE allowed the duo the ability to merge their mind and missions with a sound that blends psychedelia with beat-heavy electronic production and live, organic instrumentation. 

The duo’s debut effort, 2018’s Birds Don’t Fly was written and recorded mostly through email. But their forthcoming sophomore album VISUALS, which will be released through Lowly/Wilder Records on August 20, 2021 sees the duo writing and recording material together — in the same space and at the same time. Interestingly, during the album’s recording project, the duo realized that they sounded best when they harmonized.

Earlier this year, I wrote about album single “FROSTY,” a song that found the duo changing things up quite a bit with Stroud taking up lead vocal duties. But at its core, the song is a summery, beach friendly jam centered around a cosmic groove, easy going bass line and Stroud’s laid-back vocals. VISUALS‘ fourth and latest single “LEMON SWAYZE” was recorded between Stroud’s upstate New York barn-based studio and White’s Oregon-based domed shaped studio. Sonically, the track is a decidedly dance floor friendly jam, centered around rapid-fire, four-on-the-floor, buzzing guitars, a sinuous, motorik groove and a rousingly anthemic, euphoria-inducing hook — with a playful nod at Cyndi Lauper. As the story goes while recording the song Agustin stood in the middle of his Oregon-based domed studio and felt a channel of energy through the line that came through the studio, and began singing the first thing that came out of his mouth — which are heard on the final track.

“‘LEMON SWAYZE’ was created with the mission of bringing listeners to their feet, dancing in exaltation while on a crazy joyride,” the members of KUNZITE explain. “The track’s title was inspired by a vision Agustin had of lemons as spaceships, induced by the consumption of a favorite cannabis strain, Lemon Cake.”

Directed by Felix Heyes, the recently released video for “LEMON SWAYZE” follows a day-in-the-life of an effortlessly cool older dude, who is a mix of Captain Lou Albano, Hulk Hogan, Colonel Sanders and The Sopranos’ Paulie Walnuts as he wears a green Adidas track suit and drives around town in a lemon yellow convertible, full of lemons in the back seat. And as he zooms around town, he’s rocking out and having the best life anyone could have, which includes some absolutely hallucinogenic sequences that remind me a bit of segments of 1,2,3 Contact and Sesame Street. “The video’s lead actor, Michael ‘Keysey’ Keyes, is a Colonel Sanders-esque character who also has Hulk Hogan’s mustache, and he asked me if I knew what ‘proanoia’ was,” Felix Heyes says of the video for “LEMON SWAYZE.” “He said, ‘Well, you know how paranoia is the feeling that unknown things are conspiring against you? Proanoia is the feeling that unknown things are conspiring to help you.’ And then he drove off in a 1971 Mustang full of lemons. Being ‘proanoid’ pretty much sums up my experience with KUNZITE and the team behind this music video!”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Video: JOVM Mainstay Geographer Releases a Wistful Visual for Soaring and Plaintive “Summer of My Discontentment”

JOVM mainstay Mike Deni is a New Jersey-born, Los Angeles, CA-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, electro pop artist and producer, best known for his solo recording project Geographer. As the story goes, Deni relocated to San Francisco while living in the aftermath of the sudden and tragic death of his sister — and then the equally unexpected death of his father. While sleeping on a floor of a friend’s Haight-Ashbury apartment, Deni serendipitously found a synthesizer on the street and began to channel his grief and optimism into the songs that would eventually comprise his full-length debut 2008’s Innocent Ghost. And through the release of two more full-length albums 2012’s Myth, 2015’s Ghost Modern and three EPs, 2010’s Animal Shapes EP, 2015’s Endless Motion EP and last year’s Alone Time EP, Deni has received attention across the blogosphere for his unique, textured and soulful blend of analog, electronic  and acoustic elements, a sound that he has described as “soulful music from outer space.” 

Building upon a growing profile, Deni has toured with the likes of K. Flay, The Flaming Lips, Young The Giant, Tycho, Ratatat, Betty Who and Tokyo Police Club, and he played sets at Outside Lands Festival and Firefly Festival. Interestingly, last year the JOVM mainstay gave up his San Francisco apartment and hopped between tours and friends churches for the next six months, including a month stay back in Jersey and a few weeks in Italy (where both sides of his family are from). And he did that before finally relocating to Los Angeles. During that period of shiftlessness in which he was in limbo between his old life and new life, Deni wound up writing the material, which would eventually comprise his recently released New Jersey EP. 

Many of the songs of the New Jersey EP began in his childhood home and were finished at a friend’s Los Angeles home while he was looking for an apartment; in fact, the EP’s first two singles “Love is Wasted in the Dark” and its latest single “Summer of My Discontentment” were part of the first batches of material written during that period. “Summer of My Discontentment” is a perfect example of the JOVM mainstay’s specialty — swooning and earnest 80s-inspired synth pop, centered around a twinkling and arpeggiated piano, thumping beats, a soaring hook and Deni’s plaintive and aching vocals; but unlike some of his previously released material, the song possesses a wistful air that comes from nostalgia for a long-gone, seemingly simpler time that you can’t have ever again — and the dreams your younger self may have given up for the compromises of adulthood. 

Directed by Patrick Mattes, the recently released accompanying video follows a group of young people, full of youthful hopes and dreams on a gloriously sunny day while Deni broodingly sings the song from a different vantage point, during sunset. In some way, the video implies that the action are the reflections and reminiscing of the video’s central character — from the perspective of a complicated adulthood.