Will Shenton
In a collage of mid-century American archival footage, Jake McMullen's new video for "How Do You Get It Back" is something of a nostalgic Rorschach test. To hear the artist describe it, the imagery "is meant to conjure up emotion rather than cause confusion over its ambiguity"—when paired with McMullen's distinctively mournful vocals and minimal acoustic guitar, the result is certainly evocative.
In the vein of Andy Shauf's "I'm Not Falling Asleep," "How Do You Get It Back" uses simple shots of everyday life in a distant decade to cast the music in a sepia-tone light. Whether it's stock film of idyllic (if aggressively white) nuclear families enjoying their new cars, slightly more human home movies, or sprawling landscapes of national parks, the patchwork scenes are tailor-made for a trip down our collective, cultural memory lane.
Whether that says more about the power of media to create histories or our own longing for ostensibly simpler times, Jake McMullen's latest is beautiful nonetheless.
Jake McMullen's Giving Up EP is out now, and be sure to catch him at The Standard Hotel in Manhattan on 6/27.