What’s That in the Moonlight?: The Ghost of Cliff Burton Rises Once More…

Ah, Jef With One F — what would we do without him? About half the time I’m not sure if he’s serious or engaging in some obtuse form of performance art/comedy where the joke’s on everybody else, Andy Kaufman style, but then I end up shrugging and figure, “eh, what the hell,” because honestly, the answer’s not important anyway.

So I’m always glad to see him pop back up with some new project or idea or whatever else, be it a book, band, column, etc. Granted, this one’s not new, strictly speaking — I remember seeing something a year or so ago about the guy’s post-Black Math Experiment outfit with fellow BME-er Bill Curtner, {The Ghost of Cliff Burton} — but I’m glad for it, either way, especially now that the duo’s released its first-ever(?) video, for the track “Alive.”

I can’t really say “Alive” hews close to Jef & Bill’s previous stuff with BME (what I’ve heard of BME, anyway), mind you: a distorted, old-school beat thumps along beneath/beside woozy synths and seemingly tape-recorded spoken lyrics, broken up in the chorus by an almost-falsetto vocal line and real drums, the whole thing coming off like some crazy melding of Slint’s “Good Morning, Captain” with Cake’s “The Distance” and pretty much anything by bitterly lovelorn popsters Trembling Blue Stars. Against all odds, it works really well, enough that I keep clicking “Replay” on the YouTube page.

The video’s damn entertaining, too, with Jef doing his best sensitive/tortured artist pose out on the dunes of what I think might be Bolivar Peninsula — I love the bit where he rips a page angrily out of a notebook and throws it to the winds, only to chase after it down the beach a half-second later… Check it out right here:

The band’s debut album, Maybe Laser, comes out next month; keep an eye out…