video: John K. "My Only Girl"

"Come on Baby Spend the Night"

John K.'s Lost in the Beat has been in constant rotation in my mind since I first became enamored with John's synthetic bedroom sound. Blurring the line between bedroom syn-phonics and beat-oriented '80s pop, John has an unseemingly natural way of connecting disparate emotions and sounds until they seem so familiar that their roots are hard to trace. I always hear bits of New Order and Madonna, as well as John Maus, when I'm listening to Lost in the Beat, but where their tunes often come off as anthemic, or beguilling, John's music tends to be more personal. It's easy to hear where it comes from, possibly because it's one man making it, or maybe because he's just a guy with some instruments who happens to record when he's not teaching. "My Only Girl," one of the standouts on Lost in the Beat, is a slo-funk trip down memory lane, complete with mega-delayed guitars, an intoxicating bass line and snappy drums that come together over John's falsetto to create a perfect pallate for thinking about your one and only. Fittingly, Alex from Leftist Nautical Antiques recently edited down a bunch of Super 8mm footage he found at a garage sale into a video for the tune. "My Only Girl" will appear on the cassette version of Lost in the Beat, scheduled to come out shortly via a collaboration between Leftist Nautical Antiques and The Curatorial Club.

video: Forest Swords "Visits"

"Miarches"

Slithering like a cobra out of a cave into the desolate streets of some god foresaken place, "Visits" memorializes the striking difference between non-chalant everyday moments and foresakingly dramatic turns. As witnessed in the third installment of the Forest Swords video trilogy, the young boy, once free and full of life, is brought to the ground by his surroundings. They are so pristine, engaging and, perhaps, lethal that the boy literally can't help but keel over. And so is life. As OESB notes, "Visits," like many of the cuts on Dagger Paths, invokes a "Morricone Western flick vibe." The perils are dark, the sun peaking, blistering skin and minds, until falling prey to the inevitable is all that's left to do. If you're wondering to yourself, 'well, self, what DO I DO now?' My answer is (re)view the initial installments in the Forest Swords series, then check out a seperate video directed by Leftist Nautical Antiques Alex Davis, who also release Forest Swords tape earlier this year.

Pick up the new Forest Swords release here.