by Jean-Michel Lacombe (@lacombe_jm)
Back in early June, Philadelphia's Nine of Swords put out one of the year's best hardcore punk records with BEYOND THE SWORDS. Today the band are premiering a full-length visualizer for the album, directed by Shannon Brooks, founding member of Hook&Loop, a Philadelphia-based accessible artist collective and network led by Disabled and Chronically Ill people.
Each of the album's sub-two-minute rippers is given its own self-contained vignette, all of them united by a tone that somehow toes the line between euphoric bliss and despairing menace. Though lacking any conventional narrative, the videos are bound by sometimes playful and occasionally quite visceral interpretive dance performances, as well as stark photography of industrial spaces, pastoral rivers and forests, as well as tungsten-lit homes. A red knit blanket is quite literally the thread that we follow through the 27 minute piece, charting its various states of unraveling as it passes hands from performer to performer.
The video also features contributions from some of Nine of Swords' band members. During "FALSE MOON REDUX," the album's final song, we see a disorienting, lonely portrait of vocalist Rachel Gordon as she navigates an apartment space, eventually sitting by a window, cradling the aforementioned red garment, yarn stretching across the room and over the fireplace mantle. The segment for lovely mid-album piano piece "HOLY SMOKE" features cinematography from guitarist Chris Postlewaite. Taking a more textural approach compared to what surrounds it, the camera lingers on lived-in apartment ephemera: a red-hued print of photographer Eric Enstrom's iconic work "Grace," what looks like a hand-drawn sketch of Lenin, a poster of Goodfellas.
BEYOND THE SWORDS is out now on Quiet Year.