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Sound Tracks: “Heavens to Purgatory” by The Most Serene Republic
Believe it or not, music videos still exist. Sound Tracks trolls the internet to find the best and the worst of local artists’ new singles and the good, bad, or otherwise noteworthy visuals that accompany them.
Remember when we pretty much scolded The Most Serene Republic for releasing a mostly mediocre record? And remember how we said that the most redeeming moment on …And the Ever Expanding Universe was not only a standout on the album, but an absofreakinglutely excellent little slice of post-millenial indie rock? Well, here is the video. Finally. A good new reason to listen to this song nine times in a row.
Shot in Montreal last August and directed by music video novice Ben Steiger Levine, the video is a single shot that pans around a room where scattered pieces of band members—a Thing-like hand here, a set of Wicked Witch legs there—flop about like puppets, plucking on banjos, juggling, reading, and pulling off socks. Just a quiet day at home, you know? The slow camera sweeps are a sedating contrast to the song’s spastic audio-strobe-light outbursts (and of course, they are just so du jour in non-“video” performance-based music videos), plus, uh, how about this song, huh?
Cash for legit videos is tough to scrounge these days, so the effort on concept and the use of detailed visual elements stands out. It looks like something the Talking Heads might have done in their day; the weird-dream abstracts and the colour palette spew cutesy art all over the pop. And check the band’s self-concious grins and awkward half-gestures. In other words, omgsocute.