Dirty Lungs have been sending out their own Southern sonic smoke signals from their Birmingham, Alabama home with their recent self-titled album from Communicating Vessels. Premiering the Paul Cordes Wilm video for “Space, Man”, The quartet here can be seen making the most of their days and nights, engaging in primitive art practices, skateboarding sports, pyrotechnics, to confronting their alien, spacemen-opposites that resemble their own image. What first begins as an extension of summer idleness and fireworks late into autumn turns into close, chance encounters with their intergalactic doppelgangers.
The video for “Space, Man” begins simply enough, with the band getting back to basics by drawing primal sketches with crayons while squatting in an abandoned home in their choners. Indulging in all the restless ways to pass the day, Dirty Lungs sketch to their hearts’ content before freaking out the neighborhood by skating along the suburban streets. Searching for a kind of rudimentary heaven on earth, the band finds something more with a box full of unused/full-fused fireworks that sets the explosive scene. Cuing up the climactic unleashing of grueling guitars and gravely moon howls, Dirty Lungs ignites the gunpowder chocked cylinders into a dazzling midnight dance like cave dwellers who have just discovered the advent and invention of fire. In the backyard aftermath of a wild night, outer-space alien others appear on the scene dressed in space-suited attire that contrasts the band’s own minimalist threads. A face-to-face, head-to-head battle ensues, until helmets are removed and Dirty Lungs meet their galactic matches who collectively gasp in an astonishment larger, and louder than collided universes. Carson Mitchell chatted with us further, providing the following thoughts on the video’s mix of skateboarding in your skivvies, to the joys of lighting off fireworks of dubious legality:
Skateboarding in your thunderwear [sic] is something that’s hard to describe without doing it. The feel of the cool breeze on parts of your body not normally seen by man is exhilarating, if not cathartic. The locals gaze upon you with curiosity, disgust, and confusion yet feel compelled to ask, ‘what exactly is it you are doing, young man?’ with the utmost concern. Little do they know that in a few hours, when the evening moon has risen and the stars are aligned, a display of gunpowder and bohemian excess will be entering their corneas and consciousness with no regard for reason or comfort. No amount of daily tasks, from walking the dog, jogging the neighborhood, or retrieving the trash can will stop 5 young men and a Sony HD camera from documenting your mundane domestic trials. They left their dignity at the door, did you ever have yours?
Dirty Lungs’ self-titled is available now from Communicating Vessels.
