Video: Children, ‘Give Me the Gun’

Kevin Bronson on April 19th, 2016

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On their debut album last year, Long Beach quintet Children displayed a deft feel for vintage psych-pop without sounding too much like children of the ’60s and ’70s. The band — Tom Gil, Jeff Steiskal, Mark Yates, Graham Walker and Trevor Wallace — returned this month with the lush new single “Give Me the Gun” (Future Force Records). It’s accompanied by the trippy B-side “I Was a Man” and a bonus track, their take on Daniel Johnston’s “Some Things Last a Long Time.” Director Kate Tsang’s video for “Give Me the Gun” is a “seer’s” dream — a woman meets a “ghost” (a man wearing a sheet with eyeholes) at a party, and with one touch is able to project the future. It’s a fantastic reverie executed in a fun way.

“There are a lot of beautiful and slick looking videos I admire, but the ones that have stuck with me the most usually have an interesting visual idea and take the audience on some sort of emotional narrative journey — a lot of Michel Gondry’s work comes to mind,” Tsang told Lo-Pie, where the video premiered.

It features Patrica Lopez, Kyle Reed and Anna Lopez. Tsang adds, “I had this funny and sad idea of a lonely sheet ghost bouncing around in my head for some time and wasn’t sure what to do with it until I heard ‘Give Me the Gun.’ The song is so upbeat yet melancholic. The lyrics, to me, are about hesitating to take a chance on something good. I thought it would be fitting to make the video about the ghost and a girl falling for each other at a party, but both hesitating to take the next step.”

||| Watch: “Give Me the Gun”