Portland’s Cliffwalker is at once a breathe of fresh air and a deeply nostalgic look into the 1960’s aesthetic, but not in the way that you might think. We wouldn’t want to be hypocritical and say something like “spy rock” isn’t a term, because… you know, we spend a lot of time representing a genre with a similarly absurd title.
Either way, more than any ‘band’, apart from fellow PDX vibe-enthusiasts Human Ottoman, comparisons to espionage composers like John Barry or Lalo Schifrin would serve as a more fitting set of contemporaries. The duo casually skirts past math rock, jazz, and minimalist classical like ships in the night. Oh, speaking of seas…
Check out the exclusive premiere of the video for “Calm Sea” below, the first single off their full-length Painted Grey Sky.
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The video actually received the blessing of film director Kyros Papavassiliou to use clips of his film Impressions of a Drowned Man. Full disclosure, we’ve never seen it, but maybe we have to now. The clips certainly match the cadence of the song, and perhaps its best they don’t really give any sort of plot away, but still, our interest is piqued. Actually, maybe it’s the included quote that has us looking it:
“Totally disconnected from his past and memory, the Passenger tries to define himself confronted by his pre-determined fate, a fate that he has to re-live upon every anniversary of his death.”
Now that I think about it, I’m not sure if that quote is about the movie or about the song. Wouldn’t that be nuts if a film director said something like that about your song? I mean, maybe they did. Let’s just go with that.
Today is one of gnarliest Tuesdays we’ve had in a while – on top of this premier, we’ve got another from All Structures Align, new jams from one of Monobody‘s bass players as Holy Western Parallels, and a star studded mountain of a Tuesday Music Dump. The things we do for love, eh? Check out more Cliffwalker here, and give us tasty heart palpitations here. Thanks for reading!