Video Time: Second Lovers + Featherface + Night Drive

It’s been a while since we last took a peek ’round town at what our favorite local folks have been doing, video-wise…and it turns out that, holy crap, there’s been a lot of cool videos released over the past 8 months or so. Here’re a few:

Second Lovers, “New Mexico”

Second Lovers “New Mexico” from Tom Paynter on Vimeo.

Damn, this band just keeps getting better and better. I loved 2012’s Wishers, Dreamers & Liars, no doubt, but having now heard the band’s about-to-be-released EP, New Mexico, I’m even more impressed than I was back then.

Unlike with the band’s previous stuff, frontman Nico Morales here seems at ease with himself and the world, at last, and it’s a beautiful thing to behold. It’s jangly and sweet and countryish and…well, see/hear it for yourself with the video above, filmed up at St. Arnold’s Brewery — it’s like a double-sided ode to both beer and rough-edged-yet-pretty roots-rock, and hey, I’m absolutely down with that.

Oh, and Second Lovers will be officially releasing New Mexico tomorrow, Saturday, October 19th, up at Fitzgerald’s. Get on out there, dangit.

Featherface, “The Cosmic Draw”

Next up is hazy, heavy-lidded, soulful psych-pop band {Featherface}, who’re no strangers to the whole video thing, having popped up here a couple of times now in the last year or two. They’ve just released both new song “The Cosmic Draw” and the video for that song, apparently, and both are pretty stunning. The song itself is one side of the band’s first-ever 7″, with previously-released track “Ourselves Together” (which is also cool) on the flip side, which got named a Converse Rubber Track of the Week back in July — check that out here.

As for this latest video, though, it’s like a dreamlike walk forwards through the future of a (potential?) loved one, drifting through all the ups and downs of life together, good times and bad, momentous and banal. It’s practically a short film all on its own, telling the story of what might be almost without any words at all, and yeah, it’s breathtaking.

Weirdly, what I keep coming back to while watching the video is a comic book. One of the best, most heartbreaking stories I’ve ever read, in any format, is called “The Nearness of You, from Kurt Busiek‘s Astro City comic; it’s about a man waking up alone but with memories of a woman he’s never met before, and as he struggles to discover who she is, he finds out that in an alternate reality that never came to be, she was his wife. “The Cosmic Draw” reminds of the story, specifically in the way it depicts a life completely in wordless images, pointing out subtly that it’s the everyday moments that really matter.

Like with Second Lovers above, the Featherface guys’ll be releasing the 7″ officially really damn soon — Saturday, October 26th, over at The Continental Club. Mark yr calendars…

Night Drive, “Sea of Light”

Finally, if your life’s been missing some seriously ’80s-influenced electro-pop, well, here’s {Night Drive}, with the new video for “Sea of Light”. The Austin/Houston duo bumps and bounces through a ridiculously infectious chunk of shimmery, swaggering, synth-heavy pop over a pastiche of images from what looks like the ’60s and ’70s, and the result is something that — improvements in video technology notwithstanding — feels like it honestly could’ve come out back in the ’80s.

I don’t mean that as a bad thing, by the by; the song is impossible to resist, and the quick-cut film clips and photos are almost hypnotic, drawing you back to a simpler(?), easier-to-comprehend time before the Internet and smartphones and 24-hour news networks and everything else. It’s like looking back through a time vortex or something, and how can that not be cool?

That’s what we’ve got for now; more again someday soon, hopefully…