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.