by Will Floyd (@Wilf_Lloyd)
Fulfilment have a way of cutting straight to the chase, whittling their rollicking post-hardcore jams to their most combustible components. “Flying White Nimbus” is not the only song off the band’s succinct and exuberant new album (released this past January on Bart Records), 10 Colours, that sounds like it starts in the middle—as if you just stumbled upon a passionate rehearsal. Today the Alberta-based trio have dropped a new video for the song, collaborating with animator and multidisciplinary artist Helen Young, who used stop-motion, found materials, and other methods to achieve the video’s effects.
Those effects are as haunting as they are dazzling; a patchwork of what look like multi-colored chain links and worms serve as an animated background of the continual dismemberment of a sickly looking ceramic creature, who resembles another sickly looking creature from the legendary stop-motion video for Tool’s “Sober”. Images of fragmented bodies are an apt expression of the song’s subject matter, about which frontman Kevin Stebner (Cold Water, Grey Screen, Stalwart Sons) shared: “...deals with the way in which one bleeds out one's soul in art and in songwrit[ing], but interpersonally remains guarded with friends and loved ones. Speaking from personal experience as a gay man, it was so much easier to come out in song than to actual people in person. And within that mode, that level of self-hatred internalized, and wound up adopting a life of self-destruction [rather] than to deal with it.”
With that in mind, the strain in Stebner’s vocals end up sounding inwardly abrasive, an expression of profound internal tension. He sings emphatically at the song’s close: “They can’t touch me they can’t love me / ‘cause I’m too fast”. There’s an undeniable ambivalence between pride and shame that runs beneath the whole thing. “Flying White Nimbus” is presumably a reference to Goku’s nifty transportation device in Dragon Ball Z; in the character’s case it’s a yellow cloud that helps him get from a to b in a flash. In the song, Stebner’s vocals are buried just enough for him to sound like he could be hovering some thirty feet above you on his own cloud, able to zoom away as he pleases. Catch him if you can.