Band: The Oxford Coma
Song: “Smack & Temporary Enlightenment”
Album: Everything Out Of Tune
Release Date: October 13th, 2017
The band said of the track:
“Bassist Doug Staples and I wrote this song with our band in high school. Not all, but some of us, myself included, got heavily into drugs; it was a symptom of wanting desperately to be able to have depth and credibility as an artist… or at least that’s what I tell myself in retrospect. We used to take ritualistic trips to Empire Ranch National Preserve near Sonoita, Arizona and eat psilocybin. These trips stripped away a lot of layers of learning and certainty and left me with a feeling of incredible fulfillment, peace, and understanding, but I was also on the edge of full-blown heroin addiction; a swamp into which I descended fully shortly after this time and from which I didn’t emerge for several years. Swinging from one extreme of drug experience to the other was jarring and confusing. It had the obvious and inevitable effect of alienating my closest friends and destroying my closest relationships. The song is representative of the cognitive dissonance required to feel genuinely enlightened while at the same time being so incredibly naive, harmful, and heartbroken.
The video was shot in two locations, one of which was the same spot we used to go trip. The other was a scorched patch of forest up by Flagstaff. I think the dichotomy is appropriate. The aerial shots are alternately jarring and revealing of a beautiful landscape. There is no central narrative. It’s just kind of a bunch of loosely connected scenes that (I think) form a coherent whole once it’s over.”
Purchase:
[via Pop Matters]