Here’s the latest video from local rockers J. Roddy Walston & The Business, whose album Essential Tremors dropped last fall from the formidable ATO Records. The album’s first single, “Heavy Bells,” was a throwback rager with every bit as much heaviness as the title implies.
Here’s the latest video from local rockers J. Roddy Walston & The Business, whose album Essential Tremors dropped last fall from the formidable ATO Records. The album’s first single, “Heavy Bells,” was a throwback rager with every bit as much heaviness as the title implies. The band continues that trend on “Same Days,” which exchanges “Heavy Bells”‘ Stonesy choogle for a T.Rex-esque chunky shuffle. In another move reminiscent of “Heavy Bells,” “Same Days” features a totally weird video from some homegrown RVA talent.
The video for “Same Days” was put together at The Martin Agency, directed by Brig White and Evan Parsons, the company’s creative directors, and processed through Martin Agency in-house facilities HUE&CRY and Running With Scissors. The video cycles through a variety of strange scenes, from a Gummo-like hotel party in which young women in animal masks cavort with guns and sledgehammers in disturbing fashion to a riverside scene of an old-fashioned baptism. We also see a man at work in a butcher shop, a middle-aged woman performing for her bathroom mirror, and a man fishing alone in an isolated creek. None of these scenes, it transpires, are what they initially appear to be.
The subtly disturbing nature of the video is an apt match with the song itself and its surprisingly bizarre lyrics. You probably won’t catch it on first listen, but the lyrics focus on what appear to be deviant sexual practices, containing lines like “Your night gender is changing all the time. The oil war is down on faggot street,” and “Secret hands with money in their folds, swaddled up with heritage untold. True love waits, but that don’t make it real. Real love takes and cops that feel.” According to an interview Walston gave City Paper last year, the subject is “institutional child abuse.” That creepy topic matches well with scenes of bodies being disposed of, televisions being destroyed, and boats burning down–all of which you’ll see before this video is over.
J. Roddy and the boys will next perform in RVA opening for the sold-out Cage The Elephant show at The National on May 10, but if you didn’t grab tickets for that one, have no fear. They’ll be playing at Friday Cheers this year along with the Kopecky Family Band on Friday, May 30, and tickets for that show are still available–and for only $5 apiece! You’re not gonna get a better deal where these guys are concerned, so don’t blow it. Grab your tickets HERE.
