Illiterate Light - Two Cats

Gerard Marcus

Richmond, Virginia duo Illiterate Light use their driving rock music to peer inwards, searching down into the hidden, uncontrollable emotions within. Their video for their new single “Two Cats” is a quirky study of one of these emotions: obsession. Shot for a film festival over a single day on Super 8 film, they restricted themselves to only in-camera editing, embracing the limitations of this technique to power their creativity.

The song “Two Cats” is about someone furious that their partner is moving away, who has gone ahead with the purchase of their two cats anyway in the hope that it will make them stay. In the video, we follow two characters, “cats,” who become unrelentingly fixated on a tight-fitted floral crop top. What ensues is a quirky story that starts as a more of a Sunday morning comic strip, but with no resolution in sight, escalates to an epic backyard brawl. It’s telling how Illiterate Light handle their emotions that they’ve created such a light-hearted story to explore the desperate obsession and anger of the song. The video is a unique and creative depiction of their inner turmoil, shining a satirical light on obsession to help us all see that, sometimes, it might be better to just let it go and not take everything too seriously.

Illiterate Light are playing Brooklyn Steel this Friday, January 11th!

And the rest of their tour:

01/12 – Washington DC @ The Hamilton ^
01/15 – Ft. Wayne, IN @ The Brass Rail ^
01/16 – Bloomington, IL @ Castle Theater ^
01/17 – Milwaukee, WI @ Colectivo ^
01/19 – Chicago, IL @ Park West ^
01/22 – Indianapolis, IN @ HiFi ^
01/23 – Columbus, OH @ Basement ^
01/24 – Lexington, KY @ The Burl ^
01/25 – St. Louis, MO @ Delmar Hall ^
01/26 – Nashville, TN @ Marathon Music Works ^
01/27 – Richmond, VA @ Broadberry %
01/29 – Ithaca, NY @ Haunt ^
01/30 – Holyoke, MA @ Gateway City Arts ^
01/31 – Portland, ME @ Port City Music Hall ^
02/01 – Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground ^
02/02 – Boston, MA @ The Sinclair ^
02/05 – Newport News, VA @ Boathouse Live ^
02/06 – Charlottesville, VA @ The Southern ^
02/07 – Charlotte, NC @ Visulite ^
02/08 – Asheville, NC @ Grey Eagle ^
02/09 – Charleston, SC @ Pour House
02/10 – Jacksonville, FL @ Theater Benefit ^
03/12-17 – Austin, TX @ SXSW
05/03-05 – Atlanta, GA @ Shaky Knees Festival

^ w/ Rayland Baxter

% w/ Mt. Joy

Star Rover - Plain Air

Abigail Clyne

Star Rover’s video for their new instrumental single “Plain Air” is a dreamy dive into an ocean abyss. The video, directed by Nao Yoshigai, stars dancer Kaho Kogure performing elegant choreography beautifully juxtaposed within the rhythmic and trance-like instrumentals. The soundscape of the song is a creative combination of electric guitar, overdubbed sonar whale recordings, and a string arrangement which enters midway through, fleshing out the track's otherworldly dynamic.

The title of the song is a play on the “plein air technique,” which simply means to paint outdoors in the environment you are depicting. Kaho Kogure embodies this through dance, showing how her body moves through air, light, and water. In the video’s and song’s climax, Kogure’s previously measured movement explodes into a powerful and aggressive dance. She fully owns the space she inhabits in this beautiful moment, and shows what can be found when we allow ourselves to dive into the depths within us. 

Catch Star Rover live on December 13th at Secret Project Robot!

Breathers - 1-800-PAIN

Gerard Marcus

I have a friend who’s a bike messenger. One day while slipping through the streets of downtown Brooklyn, she rode into a car door someone opened without looking, flew off her bike, and hit the ground pretty hard. I went to see her after the accident and found her lying in bed unable to move. I told her she had to go to the doctor, just to make sure everything was ok, and she laughed. She didn’t have health insurance, couldn’t afford it, and the last time she was in a bike accident and went to the doctor she got stuck paying off thousands of dollars in medical fees. Unwilling to deal with that again, this time she decided to just stay home and self medicate until she got better. It took about a month. She’s riding her bike again now. 

Breathers is a band from Atlanta, Georgia, whose latest album ‘Designed To Break’ is full of synth pop gems designed to make you both dance and think. The new video for their single “1-800-PAIN” takes us on a surreal journey with protagonist Tommy Pain, a slightly sketchy lawyer who works in injury claims. Pain seems content within a system that takes advantage of peoples’ suffering for financial gain, until one day a minor work accident traps him in that very system. Pain tries everything he can think of to help himself, but the system does nothing but make his pain worse, leading to a moment of agony in which he destroys his own office. He collapses into a chair, sees his own ad on TV, and picks up the phone to call himself for help. It’s a brilliant critique of American healthcare and how it can drive us to forgo professionals and take care of ourselves by ourselves. Not because it’s a good idea or because we want to, but because, at a certain point, what other option do we have?

Breathers’ ‘Designed To Break’ is out now on Irrelevant Music check out and purchase the whole record HERE

VIDEO PREMIERE: The Velveteins - All Night Baby

Phillipe Roberts

Innocent sock-hop sweetness gets glossed up with tight, punchy production on The Velveteins’ “All Night Baby,” a song that checks all the boxes for a classic '60s romantic desperation anthem. The lyrics are pure teenage yearning and bravado—confident that if only you could get that one chance, you’d sweep the object of your affection into dreamy bliss. Throw in a couple “Ah La La”s (as the gang do pitch-perfectly), make sure those guitars slap back with drippy, surf-rock reverb, nail the call-and-response harmonies, and you’re halfway there. What really separates this one as a leader of the pack in the overflow of old-school aesthetic obsessives is the forward-leaning, energetic punkiness of the execution. The drums lurch into those once-dusty grooves and the rest of the band follows suit, lending “All Night Baby” the same kind of modern spin that makes a track like Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man” endearing rather than eyeroll-inducing.

A similar refined vintage quality holds true in their video, directed by the band itself. Tessellating stills of the band and friends, drawn over with layers of chalk-like graffiti, The Velveteins update the '60s vibe and present the band as a lovable gang of misfits, parading around town in a series of personality shots. The stereoscopic portraits bop and twist along to the music, coming off like a series of holographic trading cards for the band members (Collect them all!) as the music swells and shuffles around them. It’s a heartwarming peek into the world of the Velveteins, a portrait of a band falling in love with each other, and a perfect match for the gooey love song it accompanies.

VIDEO PREMIERE: twig twig - Only One

Phillipe Roberts

The art-pop delicacies Brooklyn’s Zubin Hensler creates as twig twig are playful in production and generous in melody, grasping for personal truth with eager fingers through plush, psychedelic soundscapes. Owing no small debt to his extensive work in scoring for film and television, the songs have always played cinematic—bubbly and bright with a penchant for cartoonish left-turn transitions. On his latest album, darkworld gleaming, Hensler goes for broke, releasing his most animated collection yet. Cut from the same carnivalesque Technicolor cloth as Kishi Bashi or a digitized Grizzly Bear, darkworld gleaming is as tender as it is adventurous.

The intimate vocal performances and woozy, aquatic instrumental textures of “Only One” capture this dichotomy precisely, and the track finally has a video to match. Hand-drawn overlays are applied over reels of film, translating the song’s fizzed-out, grainy quality quite literally. Gooey red letters slide by, hardly synced up to the beat as they’re met with footage of leafy plants and a bus driving backwards, nonsensical questions, and a bizarre cameo by Woody from Toy Story growing a five o’ clock shadow in sequence. It’s a charming, whimsical portrait of the song. Unconcerned with keeping a grip on reality, twig twig free-associates into a marvelous new wonderland.