Will Shenton

Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Merry Go Round

Gerard Marcus ·

Will Shenton

There's pop, and then there's pop about pop. Despite being a decidedly psychedelic band, Frankie and the Witch Fingers' latest video asserts itself squarely in the latter category with its glimmering, mod-inspired aesthetic and contrastingly dark subject matter.

"Merry Go Round" is a catchy, flower-power psych track, but the video opens with a murder. Standing over the dead body is a baseball bat-wielding woman clad in a white dress and glittery makeup, splattered with blood. She places the needle on an ivory record, and as the music kicks in she begins to dance.

The visuals throughout are, frankly, striking. Bright colors, contrasting textures, and a creative use of melting distortions make it hard to look away, and the eerie, homicidal motif adds an air of suspense; you can't shake the sense that further violence is imminent.

It's a clever play on the visual language of bubblegum pop. Combined with a series of off-putting scenes of the band members lustily embracing the killer, her eyes glazed over and a vacuous smile on her face, it brings to mind the objectification that so often defines the genre. Scoring these images with psych-rock (and excellent psych-rock, at that) seems to be an artful way to subvert that structure.

 

Frankie and the Witch Fingers are about to set out on a West Coast tour, so be sure to catch them when they come through your city.

3/22 San Francisco, CA - Amnesia
3/23 Boise, ID - Treefort Music Fest
3/24 Boise, ID - Treefort Music Fest
3/25 Portland, OR - The Know
3/26 Seattle, WA - The Void
3/28 Nevada City, CA - National Hotel
3/29 Oakland, CA - The Golden Bull
3/30 Davis, CA - Third Space Art Collective
3/31 Santa Ana, CA - Diego's
4/2 Los Angeles, CA - BlindSpot Project

PREMIERE: Lila Rose - This Could Be Ha

Will Shenton ·

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.