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Sun Blood Stories Premiere “Everybody Loves You” Video

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Slide guitarist/vocalist Amber Pollard of Idaho trio-for-now Sun Blood Stories has been experimenting with videography for a while now in terms of representing the music she, guitarist/vocalist Ben Kirby and keyboardist/drummer Jon Fust bring to life. To wit, “Everybody Loves You” which is premiering below, is at least the fourth clip from their fourth long-player, Haunt Yourself (review here), behind ones for “Up Comes the Tunnel” (posted here), “All the Words in Meaning” (posted here), and “See You on the Other Side” (posted here) and that album only came out last September as the follow-up to 2017’s It Runs Around the Room with Us (review here), which also had its share of moving-picture manifestation. The videos have become another means of exploring atmospherics for Sun Blood Stories, whose particular style of emotive post-psych can be either a salve or caustic depending on where their creative whims take them, and whose commitment to experimentation extends to the music itself as well, as the even-more-recent noise work, Static Sessions: Vol. 1 (discussed here), showcases.

The track “Everybody Loves You,” which finds Pollard very much in the lead vocally atop a rich backing of smoothly unfurled psychedelic undulation, echoing uke and all, comes with a twist. And not to spoil it, but the twist is you have to die first. The chorus of the song, “Everybody loves you, when you’re dead,” is haunting enough on its own to justify the album’s title, and repeated with the backing of Kirby and suitably ghostly harmonies surrounding, it’s one of Haunt Yourself‘s most striking and resonant impressions — which is saying something, since “striking and resonant” is a specialty when it comes to Sun Blood Stories‘ work on the whole. As the video captures tour footage from a Fall 2019 run — keep your eye out for the brainfreeze; it’s in there — and the band inherently turns the consideration of the lyrics onto themselves, essentially putting themselves (from the perspective of the viewer, at least) in the position of being the dead in question, it takes on another level of social and emotional comment, while remaining catchy in its melancholic abide.

Amid the chaos at the dawn of 2020, Sun Blood Stories posted an update promising changes coming to their social media: “We are expanding our membership this year so expect to see more bodies on stage and to hear more lush in our sound.”

It would not be the first time they went beyond the core trio form, and I’ll admit I’m intrigued to see/hear how “more lush” comes to pass in their music, not the least since, particularly if you take even a momentary sample of the video below, you’ll note there’s already plenty of “lush” in their sound as-is. But, to be perfectly honest, Sun Blood Stories are a band whose work has earned my trust at this point, and their idea of “feels right” in the music has only produced material that fascinates and challenges heart and mind alike. Wherever they might be headed, it’ll be worth finding out.

Comment from Pollard and the Haunt Yourself album stream follow the video.

Enjoy:

Sun Blood Stories, “Everybody Loves You” official video premiere

Amber Pollard on “Everybody Loves You”:

Sometime in 2018, “Everybody Loves You” came to form in our basement at 1:00a while we were taking a break from recording “Up Comes the Tunnel.” We had spent an extensive amount of time that evening talking about friends who had taken their lives and the emotions associated with that conversation were fresh and weighing on all our hearts. Jon started messing around with some beautiful chords on the ukulele, Ben hit record, and I started singing. 20 minutes later we were sitting on our back porch listening to the recording, deciding on the song’s structure, and writing down the lyrics (which ended up totaling six pages). We whittled the lyrics down to fit the agreed upon song structure and recorded it.

Flash forward to October 2019: the album had recently been released and we were out on tour for the better part of a month. I started documenting our days from the start but had no plans on what to do with the videos other than to show them to my kid when we got back. When we got home, I compiled and edited together all the footage to make a little tour diary for everyone. It wasn’t until December 2019, that I realized the tour footage (well, a condensed version of the tour footage) might make a good music video for “Everybody Loves You.” Much like the lyrics, I whittled away the excess footage and here we are.

Sun Blood Stories, Haunt Yourself (2019)

Sun Blood Stories on Thee Facebooks

Sun Blood Stories on Instagram

Sun Blood Stories website

Sun Blood Stories on Bandcamp

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