With their new five track collection of songs ‘You’re Going to make it’ recently out on Fierce Panda (Barsuk in the US), Mates of State have released a brand new video for the track ‘Staring Contest’. Its based on a true story that the duo’s (husband and wife Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel) daughter June being introduced to her class at school. Instead of doing a book reading, June decided to launch into an Adele song. The video re-imagines this as a party.
The band have decided on the shorter format as Humma states “I don’t like it, but the long play album format is probably dead. Now we just want the hits. Don’t bother me with filler; get me your best songs straightaway.” After a decade and a half of writing and releasing music, who are we to argue.
Staring Contest bubbles and ripples with this candy coated synth-pop, layers of synths loading fragments of melody on top of eachother, as these blurry chords wind around underneath everything. Gardner and Hammel trade on the lyrics rather than harmonise, but they still manage to make somehting rather beautiful between them, all wrapped up in this sugary melody. It’s rather lovely, actually.
Check out the video, here.
http://www.matesofstate.com/
http://babble.com/CS/blogs/bandonthediaperrun/
