This is a featured article originally posted on new music blog Vom. Here’s the link to the original article by Lancelot.
Hello freaks. God damn, Slow Pulp is a really really good band. This week, the group released an ethereal power-sad ballad, Falling Apart, off of their upcoming album Moveys. The track came accompanied by an incredible music video; I love when the really good bands do that.
Key to this track are the beautiful violin parts played by Molly Germer, a frequent Alex G collaborator, which add an elegant depth to the arrangement. Emily Massey’s contemplative vocals float along, peeking its head just above the surface for a look around.
“Why don’t you go back/to falling apart,/you were so good at that”, she laments in the chorus, perhaps narrating an internal monologue. The lyrics also mention “feeling like a deadbeat”, needing to “step up”, and the struggle to be enough, which suggest that the song could be more a message directed towards oneself as opposed to an external subject.
This lyrical theme, along with the dreamy arrangement, give the listener a sense of just floating through it all, not really in control of where they’re going. As if we were all stuck in a pandemic or something like that.
As I mentioned earlier, Slow Pulp decided to release this single with its music video simultaneously, and in the opinion of this amateur music journalist, it paid off bigtime.
The film’s moving-collage animation brings a fever-dream twist to the early days of MTV’s music video catalog. The viewer gets that same sense of floating or levitating through, a la Jeff Bridges in that classic Big Lebowski bowling dream sequence, featuring Kenny Rogers’ I Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In).
In one of my favorite sequences, the sun doubles as a yellow ball on a chain that swings in between Massey and the viewer’s face, as the sky quickly rises in the background like a sheet of paper. The producers, Powered By Wind, were keen to blend real and animated textures together into this trippy, engaging tapestry.
In a poignant scene, Massey searches for the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle, in a warbly house. Also, how did the animators get that shot of the puzzle piece from that underneath perspective? Powered By Wind, feel free to email me. I am so curious.
Based on what we’ve heard so far, this Slow Pulp album is as highly anticipated as anything the group has put out before. I preordered the cassette so fast, and so should you.
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Check out Moveys, the full album from Slow Pulp which is out everywhere now:
