With the release of their 10th album Sun Racket looming closer, the Throwing Muses today debut an illustrated, cut-and-pasted music video for “Dark Blue,” the churning lead single off the college-rock veterans’ first record in seven years.
The video was created and directed by John-Mark Lapham for Split Constellation, a design studio that specializes in cut-and-paste, stop-motion graphics.
The 10-song Sun Racket originally had been due out May 22 on Fire Records, but the label delayed the release to Sept. 4 “given the situation in our industry” brought on by the coronavirus.
The band — singer/guitarist Kristin Hersh, drummer David Narcizo and bassist Bernard Georges — were in the studio making Sun Racket last summer when they played their first shows in five years, a handful of concerts and a slot handpicked by Robert Smith at The Cure’s Pasadena Daydream Festival.
Of the song “Dark Blue,” Herh says: “Dark Blue” starts in California, drives to New Orleans, then flies to Reykjavik. I think it ends in dark New England at a blue table covered in blue flowers; my kitchen by the ocean last year. Sorta grim, kinda pretty.
I had to mimic the feedback of my favorite old effects pedal, which had been drowned and melted. This wasn’t a bad thing; in fact, I haven’t been able to recreate the perfect combination of drowning and melting this thing went through in new pedals, which is why I had to fake it. So the guitar feedback and harmonics are an approximation of what water and fire do to a soul, I guess. To the soul of a machine, anyway.
Ultimately, “Dark Blue” says that in running from black holes, you only increase their density and drawing power. They will cross time zones to hunt you down in dreams and songs to tell you that you’re loved, whether or not you wanna know that. From: https://slicingupeyeballs.com/2020/07/23/throwing-muses-dark-blue-video/
