PREMIERE: Happy Place - Rapture

Laura Kerry

Happy Place’s “Rapture” is a noise rock song, but it also isn’t. First of all, if you want to be technical about it, it doesn’t even qualify as a song. A song requires words set to music; an all-instrumental work like this is a work, piece, or composition. And “composition” feels much more appropriate for the work of Will Mason, a composer and conservatory-trained drummer, currently pursuing his PhD in music theory at Columbia while leading a chamber ensemble. In his band Happy Place, he has all the fixings of noise rock—explosive percussion, screeching guitars, and, well, noise—but as “Rapture” shows, he imbues it with so much more.

The video, a live performance from Cake Shop in New York, makes that apparent. In it, we see Happy Place’s two guitarists (Andrew Smiley and Will Chapin) and two drummers (Mason and Austin Vaughn) jamming out in an immersive but tranquil manner, while gazing occasionally at the sheet music (sheet music in rock ‘n’ roll!) in front of them. The composition drones on with small changes in simple guitar lines led by rapid, jazz-infused drumbeats, but the video reveals the remarkable intricacy of the operation. “Rapture” is precisely plotted and just as precisely executed. Calling on his composer background but harnessing the visceral power of noise rock, Mason and Happy Place create an oppressive yet thrilling work that lures the listener into a seven-minute trance, not loosening its grip until the very last dissonant guitar note and meticulous cymbal crash fade.

PREMIERE: C.F. Watkins - Stone Mountain

Laura Kerry

C.F. Watkins has a voice for soul-baring and storytelling. It is beautiful—lush, velvety, and strong, but able to express vulnerabilities. She can transform it in an instant from the low croon of Leonard Cohen to the confident folk melismas of Joni Mitchell. On “Stone Mountain,” off of Watkins’ I Am New (released December of last year), her voice covers that whole range and more.

Accompanying the song is a gorgeous video that provides a soulful story to match Watkins’ singing. At six minutes and ten seconds with a clear narrative arc, it functions almost as a short film in three acts. The first part begins in a pastoral setting, with a blonde Watkins walking through fields and brushing a horse, until a horn section and bass-heavy percussion escalate into a scene with hair dye dripping into the sink. When the noise fades out, Watkins emerges as a brunette from a subway station in New York, where she walks removed from people, objects, and even the animal she loved in the first part. She ends this section with the lyrics, “She was a rare and shiny bird that he couldn’t cage / Why would he cage her?” The third act cuts between the two settings.

Mirroring Watkins’ own move to New York from North Carolina a few years ago, it’s hard not to read the video as autobiography—a not-too-far-fetched theory supported by the camera itself, which closely follows her viewpoint. It tracks her at all times, zooming in on her bundled-up body, her face, her hair, and even the notebook in her hand, which bears the hand-scrawled words to “Stone Mountain.” Like her album title, I Am New, and the evocative voice that carries this gorgeous song from it, the video for “Stone Mountain” feels like a frank and beautiful statement direct from the artist’s soul.

PREMIERE: Son Step - Mai Lai Wah

Laura Kerry

The video for Son Step’s “Mai Lai Wah” stitches together some very disparate parts. Opening on a bald eagle perched above a snow-covered mountain, it flips through a cloudy sky soaked in orange sunlight, airplanes, soccer players pulling off impressive moves and performing celebration rituals, and a home video dated May 31, 1992. In a stream of seemingly random found footage, that last item is likely the most personal. Showing two young boys performing on a suburban front stoop on toy guitar and one of those plastic radios with a microphone attached, it might come directly from the home video collection of Philadelphia-based Son Step members and twin brothers Jon and Chris Coyle.

If there’s a key to crack open the video, though, that may not be it. The only characteristic that actually seems to unify the different video clips is the music itself. Soft and reflective, “Mai Lai Wah”—a hint of what’s to come in the band’s forthcoming LP, Natural Majique—is the kind of song that swallows everything in its warmth. Under the influence of Son Step’s trancelike vocal harmonies and synth sounds that fall with the satisfaction of water droplets, each scene takes on the quality of slow, deliberate movement. In the turn of the eagle’s head, the glide of the plane, the arc of the soccer player’s bicycle kick, and, of course, the swaying of the twins’ future-telling porch performance, Son Step has created a strange kind of dance video. Unable to resist the glowing textures of “Mai Lai Wah,” you may find yourself joining in in the unconventional choreography.

Be sure to catch Son Step on their upcoming tour dates:

3/26 @ Milkboy Philly (Philadelphia, PA) w/ Square Peg Round Hole (Album Release), Moon Bounce
4/20 @ Songbyrd Music House & Record Cafe (Washington D.C.) w/ Young Rapids, Summer Salt, Jau Ocean
4/22 @ Magic Gardens (Philadelphia, PA)
4/23 @ Victory's (Columbus, OH) w/ Fine Animal, TBD
4/24 @ Smiling Skull Saloon (Athens, OH) w/ Crooked Spines, Turtle Island
4/25 @ The Comet (Cincinnati, OH) w/ TBD
4/27 @ Uel Zing (Bloomington, IN) w/ Duck Trash, Ol' Buddy
4/29 @ The Keep (Chicago, IL) w/ Paper Mice, Oshwa, Advance Base

PREMIERE: Shakai Mondai - Bad

Laura Kerry

Shakai Mondai’s “Bad,” off last summer’s debut EP of the same title, is an unearthly affair. With a quietly pulsing bass, a subtle wash of shimmering synth, and her soft, high voice, the song exists more in the bleary realm of dream, in which everything is a little out of focus and colored in a shade of unreality.

It is odd, then, that she should opt for what at first seems like a very earthly music video. Shot in the woods and a garden, mostly in the rain, it emphasizes tactile experiences: a leaf bending under the weight of the rain, fingertips skating over tree bark, two foreheads pressed together. Like “Bad,” the video tells a love story through the lens of two objects relating in space, placing a man and woman in shifting relationships to each other, sometimes holding hands and walking, at other times alone or looking in different directions.

Like the song, though, it also deals in a more nebulous trade. “I don’t want to be bad anymore / Feeling’s hard but I will never do like I did before,” Shakai Mondai sings about the emotional push and pull of a relationship and the desire to make up for poor behavior—ethereal feelings that, despite its materiality, the video captures with quiet poignancy. Every so often, the vivid shots of greenery slide out focus or twitch with double vision, adding a slightly hallucinatory quality. Ultimately, it is a landscape as dreamy and delicate as the song.