Other Lives - A Fast Favourite

I’d never heard of the Stillwater, Oklahoma band Other Lives until a few days ago, and now I find myself turning off old favourites so I can get back to Other Lives’ most recent album, “For Their Love”. It really shouldn’t work for me, this quite heavily orchestrated sort of folk rock. I dip into these waters infrequently and with some trepidation. But this weird, ambitious group has won me over. If Leonard Cohen had decided from the start to work with a band, and to colour in extravagantly all the quiet spaces in his songs, he would still have sounded nothing like Other Lives, but I can imagine them touring together.

This video for my favourite song,  Sound of Violence, has horrifying black-and-white scenes of bombs being launched during wartime, or so it seems. It takes an instant (and I’m ruining the surprise here) to realize that the sequences are being run in reverse. Missiles and bullets are sucked wiggling into white skies, planes fly tail-first back to their bases. The world is made whole again. A joyous peace is wrestled from graphite darkness. It’s a moving video, edited with such exquisite timing that shrapnel flies toward the camera like music made visible. Fighter jets swoon in time to the strings. And the way the singer, Jesse Tabish, sets off with his precise, crisp delivery before you’ve really even got the headphones on (a man on a mission, if ever I’ve heard one) is something else. The feeling, if you let it come, is of a vehicle from the distant future pulling you away at light-speed from wherever you’ve been stuck.