It’s a week of contrasts for sure. We’ve had a Faroese boy band, a cultured Icelandic duo, and now some Swedish psych rock.
This is a rare case of a video being released at the same time as the track so we opted to focus on the video. When Marble Mammoth previously featured here it was a song called ‘Have the Sun lick your mind’, one that invited you to dream so high that the sun could do that to you. Presumably ‘Higher than the Sun’ aspires to something beyond our solar system.
The character in the video is supposed to be a young guy “haunted by anxiety” and the action rotates between a bathroom, a lift stolen in the back of a van from a run-down industrial estate on the wrong side of the tracks, downtown Stockholm and a boat trip on a lake, with a nervous breakdown and an Exorcist-style vomiting moment thrown in for good measure (though not pea green soup here) andsandwiched between a couple of narcotic-induced trips.
All of them with his boombox in tow until for some unaccountable reason he decides to drown it. Can he not stand his own song? And all shot through a fisheye lens. When the PR said it’s “a refreshing treat for those who are tired of bands posing for the camera” they weren’t joking.
What’s it all about? I haven’t a clue but it’s the right video for the song, which features some top class fuzzy guitar. Last time out I compared them to early Pink Floyd and between this song and the video I’m sticking with that analogy.
Marble Mammoth first saw the light of day in 2017 with the release of their self titled debut EP. Since then they’ve released songs such as ‘Wrecked Ship’, ‘Glitter Amongst Gravel’, and most recently the indie hymn referred to earlier, ‘Have The Sun Lick Your Mind’, which got on Spotify’s editorial playlist.
‘Higher than the Sun’ is released today through Klorofyll Records.