Cemeteries’ “Summer Smoke” video directed by Nolan Wilson Goff chronicles a relationship between a sentimental ghost and a girl as she grows up. The man behind the Cemeteries moniker, Buffalo’s Kyle Reigle offers a single of dreamy and pensive familiarity with an aesthetic not unlike Chris Issak’s 1989 classic, “Wicked Game”. Fortunately, for Cemeteries, the video is way better with a little more narrative than Isaak’s soft-core beach vibe.
The music video carries a coyly ambiguous narrative through a series of flashbacks to a time in which a girl and her sheet-covered ghost of a best friend hung out together. The whole thing feels pretty metaphorical. Eventually two are tragically torn apart by the girl’s introduction to human, non-sheet covered friends (tragic.) The video and song pairing captures that longing for a return to imaginative innocence that everyone feels when watching something like a Miyazaki film or reminiscing over old toys or dolls. The cinematography is pretty sleek and its stylized feel is convincing in cadence with the lazily wistful “Summer Smoke”’. Take a break. This one is gorgeous and shit gets emotional.
The music video for "Summer Smoke" comes a few months after Cemeteries’ more upbeat single and title track “The Wilderness” and arrives on the verge of his album release on October 23 via Lefse where it is now available for pre-order.
