Houston, Texas's Drowner have returned with their new album, You’re Beautiful, I Forgive You, from Saint Marie Records, and take us today to the hotel hyperventilation claustrophobia in the debut of their video for, "Stay With Me". Directed by the band's multi-instrumentalist Darren Emanuel, the group of frontwoman Anna Bouchard, guitarist Sean Evans, and bassist Mike Brewer gets themselves cooped up in a b/w suite that spells out the guitar dream drills of dependency and evocations of a profound inner desperation. This is the search for fulfillment of the soul, shot like an art-house-French nouvelle vague feature that Godard himself would approve.
The beginning gives you a bird's eye view of the metropolis before you are brought to the confined walls of a cigarette steamed hotel room. That outside world narrows itself like the looming guitar layers that crawl like the skin's discomfort of shelled up solitude. The electric buzz of shining strings, and Anna's edge of enchantment and reason ring forth for that counterpart; a secret other to share perhaps an ill-suited personal cell. From the begging and pleading to the balcony's bleeding light, Anna and company illustrate that element of the human experience of desire, needs, and wants that can only be completed by that secret sharer. This is a song that seeks more than a cliché soulmate, but rather that lost double and extension of the self.
Darren wrote us the following piece on the manner by which the video interacts with the heavy interior of "Stay With Me":
"What I had in mind with the video was a kind of psychological crisis, as a counterpoint to Anna's amazing lyrics and vocal performance. I wanted there to be a tension between two sides of a self struggling for dominance. The light effects and the window being a metaphor for the overwhelming pressure of that struggle, both from the inside and from the outside. The doppelgangers are so similar to us outwardly but there are subtle differences, they dress slightly differently, the stand and move a little differently. She reaches across to that other self in an attempt to integrate again but she's thwarted and gives up.
The flashing white light tries to match the intensity of the music but also lends a kind of chaos to the scene, along with the impatient focus, the wrecked headboard, the seedy motel room and occasional jagged camera move. The heavy grain black and white was decided near the end of post production and pushes it a bit toward a horror film genre."
Drowner's You're Beautiful, I Forgive You is available now from Saint Marie Records.
