Today, Films on Song (“Films” for short) released their single “Ritual Day.” Though normally a four piece group, two members do the majority of the writing – Teeter, on vocals and guitar, and Francis, who plays bass and also arranges each of their tracks. They explained the new single to us via email earlier this week:
While we were between line-ups, we recorded this song – then, for whatever reason, we forgot about it for nearly a year. It didn’t really fit on the two EPs we put out recently and we weren’t sure if we were going to add real drums once a drummer came into the picture or not. I revisited it late last year and got excited about it as it was, so we added a few finishing touches and mixed it. It’s a song about looking forward to things that may never come.
Inspired by 80s/90s shoegaze and post-punk, the track features effortlessly grungy guitars as heavy as cinder blocks; smooth, silken vocals erode the stone after like cascading water. Melancholy permeates the narrative – true to their name, the images within ultimately esoteric but individually resonant of art cinema – rain overflowing a cup of coffee, a bird with a key in its beak that speaks in riddles. It all gets to be too much; the hope seems to suffocate rather than comfort. “Take me where the stars are good,” he sings, succumbing to the futility, the choral chain of “la-la-las” that float after solidifying this as something akin to an inescapable dream.
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photo courtesy of artist
kid with a vinyl 