by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
When we last heard from A Very Special Episode, the New York City based post-punk band had just released last summer’s Freak Me Out, an album that found the band exploring their sound and pushing their own boundaries to great effect. It’s an ambitious album yet insistently DIY, a record built around both cloudy tension and swelling pop structures. Less than a year later and they’re back it, this time teaming up with their Brooklyn peers in Desert Sharks for a new split EP. With two songs from each band, DS + AVSE, due out March 8th via Substitute Scene Records (Wetsuit, Den-Mate, Sick Day), is a great pairing, gloomy but radiant, it’s a big overdriven blast of explosive grungy goodness and shadowier textures. Based around the four elements, each song is inspired by one of four elements , with “Smolder” providing the spark that revolves around “fire”.
There’s a cinematic elegance to A Very Special Episode’s “Smolder,” captured both in the song itself with it’s sweeping construction and in the Jen Meller directed music video (which stars Wetsuit’s Allison Becker). Blanketed by a psychedelic hum, the trio let the crackling fuzz and twangy distortion come in and out of focus, the detached vision of the song’s slow building atmosphere. For all the slinking glory of the structure, it’s Kasey Heisler’s soaring voice that steals the show as she belts out the hook with bombastic grace and primal beauty.
Speaking about the track, Heisler shared:
“As someone who has only ever choreographed school musicals, I was excited and nervous to orchestrate the dance for “Smolder”. Lucky for me, we had an awesome team to pull this off with. Patrick [Porter] and Chayse [Schutter] helped shape the vision, Allison was down to play and move and stand on a dolly, and Jen is so skilled at capturing movement and dance. It was a magical feeling shooting the last scene in a three way waltz with myself, Allison, and Jen’s camera to create the intense final visual of the video.”
If you’re in New York, catch A Very Special Episode live this Thursday, February 15th at Alphaville (tickets).