Death and its subsequent impact on the living has always been a subject of great interest and inspiration in music, making for brilliant fugues and beautiful requiems, and maybe the occasional emo song. It’s more rare, however, that the morbid, the macabre, the funereal, constitutes an entire project and influences its every move. Lydia Lunch, an ordained reverend in the Universal Life Church (among other things), has taken a lifelong fascination with the funeral arts and transformed it into a “fully operational funeral collective/service,” otherwise known as the band she now fronts, called, Family In Mourning. Lunch is joined by Dahm Majuri Cipolla, Ben Lord, and David Lackner to create immersive, melodic eulogies in which the living can take solace and look forward to an afterlife. It’s a beautiful art.
Their music videos are no different. Take, “Lover Have Mercy,” for instance, which is premiering here today. Directed by Jasmine Hirst, it’s a surreal and dilapidated drift through train terminals and city sidewalks, through troubled pasts and desolate nows. Lunch floats through it all, like a forgotten soul unsure of where she belongs. The skyline penetrates, ever present, through memories of embraces from a lost or left loved one flickering in and out of the forefront. Closeups of Lunch show a face as exasperated and lonesome as the song itself, woefully imploring us or whomever to “please search” for her. The whole thing resonates with the weight of speaking to friends and family after the burial of a loved one; you’re unsure of where to go or what to do. You’re lost.
