PREMIERE: Maggie Rogers - Blood Ballet

Photo: Katia Temkin

Will Shenton

Authenticity is a difficult characteristic to bottle. Try too hard, and everyone knows you're faking it. Don't try hard enough, and it can seem like you're hiding behind impersonal detachment. On her stunning new video, "Blood Ballet," Maggie Rogers finds the balance with virtuosic ease.

The raw, emotional delivery of her vocals and acoustic guitar have a first-take quality that sounds like a close friend playing on your couch (and, as far as we know, that's exactly how the video was recorded). Rogers' occasional lyrical quaver and rough chord changes only add to the effect.

"Blood Ballet" is a song that's both melodramatic and understated, tear-jerking and cautiously hopeful. And perhaps most impressively, it establishes Rogers as an extraordinarily versatile artist who's as comfortable with unpolished solo folk as she is with studio-quality performances. Whether this is your first introduction to her work or you adored her last LP to death, it'll be hard not to fall in love with this piece. If you're in NYC, be sure to catch Rogers with her full band live December 14th, 10 pm at Pianos on the Lower East Side.

PREMIERE: Lila Rose - This Could Be Ha

Will Shenton

Oakland-based pop artist Lila Rose's sophomore LP, WE.ANIMALS., has been out for over five months now, but apparently that doesn't mean she's anywhere near done with it. Along with drummer and songwriting partner Daniel Garcia, she's been hard at work creating a series of dramatic music videos to accompany the record since before it was even released. The latest, "This Could Be Ha," is perhaps their most ambitious DIY effort yet.

Conceived, written, directed, filmed, and edited almost entirely by Garcia himself (Rose gets a credit for camera support in the official description), it's one of the few times I've seen a band do their own video work and have it turn out looking, you know, actually professional. Shot in the beautifully desolate Valley of Fire State Park, about fifty miles outside of Las Vegas, it portrays the saga of a tortured mystic (played by Rose) as she traverses the desert.

The whole thing ties in with the broader themes of WE.ANIMALS., which at its core is an impassioned, sometimes desperate call to arms in defense of the environment. Touching on issues as broad as climate change and as personal as struggling against perceived inevitability, the album seems to be a distillation of all that Lila Rose holds dear. As a song, "This Could Be Ha" was an emphatic piece of that tapestry—with this video, it may have been elevated to something even more powerful.