Melbourne’s CITY CALM DOWN have revealed the video to JOAN, I’M DISAPPEARING, the second single taken from the band’s second album, ECHOES IN BLUE.
The video was directed by Riley Blakeway, beautifully shot on 16mm on a desolate old farm in New South Wales. Blakeway says: “With Joan, I’m Disappearing, I felt a strong sense of loss and isolation when I heard the song. I just started interpreting that in my own way, and I really wanted to make a short film about the cyclical nature of grief of anger. All three of the cast are non-actors; I like to cast real people to play heightened versions of themselves”.
Of the new single, front man Jack Bourke explained, “Joan is about coming to terms with the dissolution of a long-term relationship and how neglect ultimately led to its breakdown”.
Two years on from their surefooted debut, IN A RESTLESS HOUSE, Jack Bourke [vocals] Sam Mullaly [synths and keyboards] Jeremy Sonnenberg [bass] and Lee Armstrong [drums and percussion] have consolidated their strengths and stretched their horizons for ECHOES IN BLUE. Recorded in Melbourne with producer and long-time collaborator Malcolm Besley, the new album explores the emotional idiosyncrasies of our modern changing world, rendered in glistening keyboards, chugging guitars and triumphant horns.
ECHOES IN BLUE is CITY CALM DOWN’s most sweeping, universal material to date. Anchoring the album’s epic pop drive is the band’s accomplished song writing, which catalogues the mounting anxieties of our age with an unflinching eye. As more of our daily life becomes pressurised to meet endless round-the-clock demands, CITY CALM DOWN meditate on what’s being lost in translation and why it matters.
Speaking about the album, Jack Bourke adds: “Echoes in Blue is not concerned with answering questions as much as it is asking them. It is interested in the reality of being spread too thin, of being unable to shut out the noise, where we’re told to buy a house with a mountain of debt. Do we do what we love? To be passionate and driven, whilst making enough time for our wife or husband, for our boyfriend or girlfriend, for our children, parents and friends? Has life ever been more exciting or more artificial? Why are we so connected yet feel so alone? Perhaps, in all this excitement, we forget to be bored and forget to examine ourselves a little more closely. Or maybe we should just embrace the rage?”
The new single, JOAN, I’M DISAPPEARING, follows on perfectly from the release of THIS MODERN LAND late last year, which gave an exciting taste of what’s to come from their second full release, and earned the band accolades from the likes of BBC Radio 1, BBC 6Music, NME, The 405, Dork Magazine, Triple J and Stereogum.
CITY CALM DOWN will return to return to the UK and Europe in May for an extensive string of shows that will see them perform multiple times at this year’s Great Escape Festival in Brighton and Gold Sounds Festival in Leeds. Full dates as follows:
MAY
Thu 17 BRIGHTON Great Escape Festival
Sun 20 LEEDS Gold Sounds Festival
Mon 21 GLASGOW King Tuts
Wed 23 MANCHESTER Deaf Institute
Thu 24 LONDON Borderline
Fri 25 AMSTERDAM London Calling @ Paradiso
Sat 26 HAMBURG Nochtwache
Mon 28 BERLIN Privatclub
