Monolith Cocktail Blog

VIDEO PREMIERE
Dominic Valvona
Photo: Rachael Tabet

Postcards   ‘Dead End’
(t3 Records)

Emerging from the tumult of the geopolitical flashpoint of Beirut, the shoegaze/drone rock trio Postcards channels an enraged melancholy through the most somnolent of vaporous cinematic styled music. Following in the wake of two dreamy and gauzy albums, the haunted Lebanese lineup of Julia Sabra, Marwan Tohme and Pascal Semerdjian asked fellow compatriot and filmmaker Tariq Keblaoui to shoot a vivid nocturnal video for the intimate but dramatic slow-motion plaint ‘Dead End’.

The band’s bassist/vocalist Sabra describes the visual themes behind the video for Dead End as, ‘a surreal depiction of a nightly walk, inspired by our lives in Beirut, where the normal often turns into the absurd, both emotionally and socio-politically.’

Taken from Postcards second, most recent, album Good Soldier (released back in January of this year) Dead End is a sleepwalking, translucent soundtrack awakening that reimagines Julee Cruise fronting the slow-core Low. Suffused with a brooding ether of untethered lulled vocals, strained waning guitar and wispy cymbal burnishes, the Slowdive and Floydian atmospherics subtly swell to punctuated intense crescendos that allude to something dangerous and tragic.

Reflecting the tumultuous setting of the band’s home city – forever a strategic important city in a country that has seen inter-fractional fighting between all sides in the politics of the Middle East, in more recent years the country has been caught up in the recent Syrian civil war, taking in a million refugees escaping the bloodshed from Bashar Hafez al-Assad’s apocalyptic state – Postcards have chosen a spellbinding video for a spellbinding track that merges shoegaze with the intimacy of chamber rock to reflect the anguish and anger.