Hey pals! This week I’m doing a bit of traveling up and down the California coast, which is really exciting. If you’ve never taken the coastal 101 freeway from San Diego to San Francisco, I urge you to do it soon because it’s incredibly beautiful. Almost as exciting as the actual trip, though, is making playlists for the car. This entire week, I’ve been daydreaming about glittering ocean landscapes and frolicking in the dense Northern California forests. The songs I’ve chosen to bring you act as a soundtrack to the movies in my mind and are perfect to bring with you while you’re skipping town or just daydreaming on your daily commute.
Last month, Morgan Delt released his album, Phase Zero on Sub Pop. Now, he’s hit us with a video for the serenely psychedelic melody, “Some Sunsick Day”. Honestly, my jaw dropped the first time I saw this video. I haven’t had such a visceral reaction to a music video in a long time. It brought up a strange feeling of childhood nostalgia inside of me and reminded me how I perceived the world as a kid. My dreams constantly blended with reality. The insane video was directed by Vinyl Williams, who described it as “humanity’s memories and dreams… projected as fractured ruins upon [a] new dream world’s landscape.”
This week, Phoenix based Diners released his album Three on Asian Man Records. The dreamy jangly guitar on “Fifteen on a Skateboard” instantly takes me back to when I tried learning how to skateboard as a kid and how free it made me feel cruising through the suburbs. In reality, though, this song sounds nothing like what it was like for me to be 15 years old, trying so hard to be a super cool skater chick. *Spoiler Alert* It didn’t happen because I hate falling and I scar really hideously. In the video, we get to see Tyler Broderick act as a man who drives a mini-van and works at a pool shop. In between keeping the shop clean and inflating pool toys, he daydreams of the beach and plays guitar.
Sampha, aka the guy who sang on all the best tracks on SBTRKT’s first album, aka the reason why I believe in angels, has just released his very first solo music video for “Blood On Me”. Seriously, I instantly love any track he lends his angelic voice to and I’m so happy that he is finally releasing his own solo album after doing about a million of the best features for Drake, Kanye West, Frank Ocean, etc. In the clip, we see Sampha wake up in a car that has somehow crashed high up in the branches of a lone tree. Eventually, the branches pierce his body and begin growing all around him. The track is off his forthcoming album, Process.
Australian artist, Gordi is fantastic at blending things that don’t seem like they would go well together. On her newest EP, Clever Disguise, she often fuses folk-y acoustic guitar, with electronic drums, and even runs her vocals through a vocoder. Much like Gordi’s songs themselves, her video for “So Here We Are” is also an interesting amalgamation of unlike mediums. Animations seamlessly blend into live-action shots of Gordi singing in the backseat of a car and back again. This is a perfect track to listen to on those contemplative late night drives.
Back in 2014, John Dwyer took a quick break from the insane Thee Oh Sees and began his synthier solo project, Damaged Bug. Hubba Bubba, his first released under the moniker, instantly became one of my favorite albums. It was unclear whether the album was going to be a one-off thing, but in June of this year, he finally released his second album titled Cold Hot Plumbs. Three months later, we get a video for “The Mirror”, featuring a creepy secret agent who turns people into evil robots.
David is a surreal five part mini-series starring Nathan Fielder of the hysterical “Nathan For You”. The series starts out with the recently divorced and laid off David going to a psychic and finding out he has five weeks to live. He then seeks advice/ solace in all the strange places we as a society go to – doctors, religion, the lottery, sports, etc., to no avail. Although that might sound incredibly bleak, the series is actually pretty funny and gives off major Twin Peaks vibes with its off kilter characters. Will Wiesenfield aka Baths aka Geotic also did the synthy soundtrack that runs throughout. You can watch the entire series in about half an hour, so it’s perfect for when you feel like binge watching something, but don’t have that much time to kill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAOOO12KW60
This is a last minute addition, but this is so ridiculous I had to share it. There are a lot of challenges that go viral on the internet, but I’m really rooting for 2016 to be the year the #FlamingCactusChallenge becomes a thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diAgkXkady8
