GADADU is an avant-pop/neo-soul band based in NYC. Their latest video is particularly relevant to the current political climate in America, highlighting the political pessimism of the working class. The video features a lumberjack facing off with an owl and gang of birds that try to dissuade him from cutting down a tree. The lumberjack, a tree himself, is forced into an existential struggle between hope and beauty and his blue-collar living.
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.
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.
Kelly Kirwan
Derek Ted wastes no time diving into soft and stripped-down folk on his latest single, “Acting Right.” Taking a hiatus from the rock quartet Owl Paws (where he fronts as Derek Schultz), the independent Derek Ted has delicately crafted an EP (Wilted in Summer) that stokes those feelings of loneliness and self-deprecation. The song is brief—just missing the minute-and-a-half mark—a fleeting moment of reflection about what could have been.
The accompanying music video is a montage filmed in dark, shadowy filters. It takes place entirely at night, opening on a dimly-lit suburban street as a woman twirls, trees stretching overhead. The remaining images follow this theme, an array of silhouettes or projected branches against a blank wall. The camera angles switch between fairly straightforward shots to ones that are more asymmetrical, highlighting a woman’s boots or looking down at a somewhat eerily-lit purple bouquet (one of the only pops of color throughout). It’s a video that feels like nostalgia incarnate—a memory now filtered through a painful lens, of what was and perhaps won’t ever be again.
Derek Ted’s voice has that raw and slow tonality often associated with forlorn folk. It’s either tender and (intentionally) strained or hitting a pastoral falsetto, evocative of the most peaceful, lush landscapes. “I now recognize I have a problem,” he opens, before admitting, “I couldn't ever be the one to love you right / I couldn’t ever know I wasn’t acting right.” It’s a bittersweet blip, and just enough to get you hooked.
