The video for “Springtime” by Chopper looks like it could have come out of the same time period as the first handful of Gregg Araki’s films and captured on an old, high quality VHS tape. Musically it’s like a more darkwave My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult song or something by Alien Sex Fiend. But more melodic, more glam rock, but with the same gloriously lurid aesthetic. The song has a lush quality that boils up and flares out dramatically that suits the sights and sense of adventure in the song with its blossoming flowers, fire, fireworks and night drive visuals and the darkly passionate and romantic sentiments of the lyrics. It’s the kind of song one hopes to hear at Goth nights around the world because it fits right in with the modern incarnation of that sort of thing without being defined by it. “Springtime” is the first single in Chopper’s forthcoming mini-album Shock Pop Vol. 1 which should release later in 2023. But for now you can watch the music video on YouTube and follow Chopper at the links below.
Images in black and white, a woman laying on the ground looking into the near distance flanked by footage of the tides. Then tides coming in and in reverse out. Simple, ghostly synth melody echoing and then giving way to lightly distorted keyboard tracing a line that that goes up and slightly down as the tides move about and hints of another figure appears as a layer of the image over which the tides become slightly transparent. We see a man sitting in an alcove surrounded by an enclosure with foliage. This is how Raelism’s “Self-Soothe Mechanism” starts before the minimalistic percussion edges into the soundscape. The atmosphere of the song and the footage is reminiscent of what a sequel to the 1962 horror classic Carnival of Souls might look and sound like. Especially when the spooky glimmers of higher pitched synth bursts in with short lines answered by hovering, darkly ethereal drones. And then the color as the figure sings/speaks “I didn’t hit you, I didn’t cut you” in almost deadpan fashion. Then the male figure crawls menacing forward from his greened alcove juxtaposed with an image of him sitting at the top of a staircase and holding his face in his hands. It’s a psychological horror in short form and the title of the song might seem counter intuitive except that when someone repeats what he wants to believe to himself to soothe a guilty conscience over some actual or imagined wrong it definitely serves that purpose. Like a mantra that can also serve to heal through reaching into that personal darkness deeply and bringing forth deep seated feelings that haven’t been allowed expression by the conscious mind. And yet the chilling aspect of the composition especially given the video treatment while unsettling is also calming. The combination is like if Alien Sex Fiend made a chill, ambient track with an A24 director directing the music video except in this case it was Abigail Clarkson. Is that perhaps too on the nose connecting the name of this project with the UFO cult of the same name started by Claude Vorihon in the 1970s? Maybe so, but it’s another dimension to this fascinatingly unusual music. Watch the video for “Self-Soothe Mechanism” on YouTube and follow Raelism on Spotify. Look for The Enemy is Us EP set to release in 2022.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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