Video premiere: The Soft White Sixties, ‘Brick by Brick’

Kevin Bronson on January 18th, 2018

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The Soft White Sixties’ latest single “Brick by Brick” (and its Spanish-language twin “Piedra a Piedra”) — could not be more relevant. It’s about a wall — The Wall — and was written by a first generation Mexican-American, the band’s frontman Octavio Genera, about the time Donald J. Trump was winning. The band’s new video, edited by Aaron Eisenberg, is a montage of video clips that, notably, starts with snippets from the 1953 Coronet Instructional Film “Who Are the People of America?” before deteriorating into clips of sensationalized news and exaggerated soundbites.

“There was a lot of spontaneity in the process of this new record — every song was written in the studio with really no pre-production,” Genera says. “Being that our first night in the studio fell on Election Night, that tension and energy crept its way onto the album in various ways with this song being the most blatant example. It only seemed appropriate to apply that same approach to the video by creating a spontaneous collage of sensationalized news, daytime TV, bad re-runs — essentially what I imagine is on loop on the President’s White House bathroom television set.”

The bilingual singles are the first from an album that will include English and Spanish versions of each song, marking the first time Genera, who grew up speaking both languages, has tried to sing in Spanish. The songs will be available as a 7-inch single at the band’s show tonight at the Echo; a portion of ticket and vinyl sales will be donated to the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN-LA), a local group that provides immigrant integration programs, legal services and educational programs.

||| Watch: The video for “Brick by Brick”