Tag: Glitches

PLAYING DETROIT: Flint Eastwood “Oblivious”

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New year, old song, new video: the perfect transition into a what is sure to be a creatively bountiful year for Detroit and beyond. While our gaggle of talent puts the finishing touches on upcoming projects, releases and new visions Flint Eastwood’s latest video for “Oblivious” a track from last year’s Small Victories EP is a beautifully hyped visual for a song that begs to brace for change with a tumultuous fluidity. We find our heroine Jax Anderson, dressed in her usual dapper, western priestess attire dancing a warrior dance with similarly clad compatriots in a warehouse space. We are also introduced to our antagonist and mysterious femme fatale, who is shown by the lakeside and sauntering through a wheat field cloaked in black with rope precariously in hand. “Oh, I keep my eyes closed/Keep my mind oblivious, oblivious” claims Anderson, covering her eyes mid-dance as if to insinuate that our blindness is voluntary. It is with that imagery that Anderson is ambushed and a black bag is thrown over her head as she is dragged off and kidnapped. The most striking visual component is the violently ethereal underwater footage of our simply clothed leading women, swirling about in a tangled tango of light and dark as we are confronted with sporadic shots of what must be a brief life-flashing-before-your-eyes moment. The water bubbles look like cosmic explosions against bare skin and the mirrored black tile crosses which feel curiously morbid in context. Are we in control? Is it best to remain oblivious and be swept up in spontaneous fate? For a pop song, Flint Eastwood poses existential quandaries and pairs them with brooding cinematic storytelling that keeps us guessing, heads just above water.

The most striking visual component is the violently ethereal underwater footage of our simply clothed leading women, swirling about in a tangled tango of light and dark as we are confronted with sporadic shots of what must be a brief life-flashing-before-your-eyes moment. The water bubbles look like cosmic explosions against bare skin and the mirrored black tile crosses which feel curiously morbid in context. Are we in control? Is it best to remain oblivious and be swept up in spontaneous fate? For a pop song, Flint Eastwood poses existential quandaries and pairs them with brooding cinematic storytelling that keeps us guessing, heads just above water.

Watch the video, via the band’s Facebook page, below:

PLAYING DETROIT: Flint Eastwood “Glitches”

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Flint Eastwood‘s “Glitches” finds its heroine in Jax Anderson, whose battle with her mother’s death gave us the album Small Victories last fall. Small Victories was a eulogy, a cry for closure, and ultimately a poetic pop anthem for anyone who has ever suffered immeasurable loss. Don’t mistake Anderson’s confessionary vulnerability for weakness; she rises up and throws emotional punches in “Glitches” like a boxer in training in preparation for the ultimate head to head: the past v. the future.

The video is simple in its content but executed with a cinematic richness that reads as an autobiographical dream, or more so peephole into the internal mechanism required to face her own mortality. The video follows Anderson as she begins training with a coach who is also training a young boy. This paralleled shared experience between the antagonist and the child is reflective of the connectivity between our inner child and our adult self, realizing that the fight within is inherently present. There are several visceral cuts to Anderson as the only passenger on a boat speeding across the water that evokes an urgency as the viewer can only assume that she is searching for the intangible.

The video gives the illusion of slow motion and embodies a discernable hesitation. This barely palatable distortion of speed feels like a personal attempt at the grieving platitude of taking one day at a time, but in “Glitches” proves to be a poignant play on sensationalized time. The climax reveals cuts of Anderson in the ring to her feverish hunt in a sun drenched church, where she confronts a television screening real home movies of her as a little girl featuring her mother as she mouths the words “Turn it Off!” to the camera man. It is the fusion of this authentic, remarkably personal moment tied to a Anderson’s semi-fictionalized characterization that tugs on our own experiences and poses the question: “how do we move on?”

Watch Jax Anderson throw some emotional punches below:

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