Video premiere: DreamVacation, ‘Press Play’

Kevin Bronson on June 22nd, 2016

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The mesmerizing black-and-white video for DreamVacation’s “Press Play” pushes a lot of buttons, and “play” is but one of them. The song, says the quartet’s frontman Ray Silva, “is a love letter written for a lost love set within a post-apocalyptic video game.” And the video — written and directed by the band’s drummer Noah Alexander — takes that concept to the streets of Los Angeles, depicting a man, a woman and the foreboding cityscape they inhabit.

Says the band: “We see a being following another person but we never really know if he is helping, controlling or stalking the girl. He seems to be in multiple places at once, both following messages projected around the city and shadowing the girl. The mysterious man who emerges from the water also seems to be melting as time progresses. Does this being need another soul before nightfall? Is it our relationship with God and spirituality? Or is it just a creepy old man who’s fond of other people’s tubs?”

The video, which features Cortney Alexander, Sal Gpa and, at the end, Silva himself, was filmed by Daley Hake around L.A., with the band running a laptop and projector off their car battery. It’s a brilliant piece of DIY cinema, and worthy of DreamVacation’s often-epic, always-filmic shoegaze/post-rock. “Press Play” appears on the EP “Window Room,” released last fall, and the quartet — Silva, Alexander, guitarist Morgan Terrinoni and bassist Gerry Matthews — have followed it up with the new single “Letting in the Dead.”

DreamVacation, which gave one of the best small-stage performances we witnessed at Make Music Pasadena, here show that you don’t need to be a huge band with a huge budget to execute something conceptually big. Watch this one twice.

||| Watch: The video for “Press Play”