My Acolyte Journey: 2014.32

Octahate.
Ryn Weaver. This song (finally) has a clear message and central, carrying idea. The first line clearly communicate powerlessness in the face of overwhelming, titanic forces coupled with the explanation: She's not thinking clearly because of the way her ex left her.

Lost in the cracks of the landslide . . . Deep in the haze of your love high/ I used to soar on the livewire/ I'm coming down from your supply

 This theme develops through the song. Whoever her lover was has gone, taking a lot of her emotional security and self-worth. She's not blaming this unspoken other, because despite the confusing nature of the end of their relationship, she "should have known." I find it hard not to feel for her. She's had an emotionally devastating experience, and she's equating it to the destruction of earth. I get that. I've been melodramatic in a breakup before (this is not news) and I've written really over-wrought dripping prose while feeling sorry for myself.

But.
I (me, Robby) am not totally on-board for this. There's no good reason to share this song with the world, Weaver. Yes: I appreciate that you're feeling sad. But good breakup songs have something to say. This one's just "I'm sad, I'm sad, I'm so so sad." I get that she's being an adult about it (no blame), and I do love that. I appreciate that sometimes you've just got to feel sad without meaning. But I ache for more depth since I'm not sharing the emotion right now.

So now for the music video. It has some kind of classy clown thing going on, and it's wildly distracting from the music itself. I mean, this is a legitimately good-sounding song: I like the sound (it's fresh and beautiful, along the same emotional lines as what Katy Perry tries to do) and it's I think as good as This is Gospel. But the video!
Let's talk. When you have a harlequin aesthetic combined with a classy chic thing combined with the uncanny (white bodysuit?) combined with a younger version of the singer, what you pull out of the pot is only confusion. This is not helped by the editing, which gives me five frames to see what is legitimately the best part of the whole video: a moment in which Weaver and young Weaver alternate with paint tears being streaked down their faces. Find it here. Refresh a few times; it's worth seeing. But everything else is a mess of jump cuts and throw-away moments. "Look, we smashed things! But we never give you a wide shot for emotional pay-off. And seriously: Invincible has an incredible payoff. There's this long, slow pan up towards what you KNOW is going to explode, and then . . . catharsis.

Essentially, I would listen to Octahate readily, but I wouldn't buy it. Yet.
(P.S. two things: what's her mascara doing? And really I just googled "classy clown" to try to find Harlequin. It didn't work.)