Video, Methyl Ethel ‘Trip The Mains’

Zane Roessell on March 12th, 2019

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What do you do living in a world where if the sun doesn’t kill you, just about everything under it will? If you’re Australian multi-instrumentalist Jake Webb, you make music — the really good kind.

Webb’s outfit, the sonically boundless Methyl Ethel, in February released their latest full-length “Triage,” completing their triptych of albums beginning with 2016’s “Oh Inhuman Spectacle,” and following-up 2017’s “Everything Is Forgotten.” In writing “Triage” Webb “felt a sense of closure,” with the album coming as an expression of his own catharsis in “explor[ing] the notion of coming of age, only to reference it for the snapshots and passing memories that it has become.”

Speaking of the track, Webb shares “behind every eye-twitch, a depleted mainframe barely pulses. ‘Trip The Mains’ is my moment of short-circuiting.” And how. A nearly 4-minute dalliance with 80’s synth-pop, “Trip The Mains” simultaneously corrals you with walls of synth chords and soothes you with Webb’s George Michael-esque delivery. In the Matt Sav-directed video we are transported to Webb’s swirling world of abstract fantasy, where he tepidly defies gravity and broods in the hyper-realism of all-too-close camera angles. The confluence of sound and video in “Trip The Mains” speaks directly to the heart of our vulnerability and it’s self-arbitration through social media.

Methyl Ethel kick off their North American tour in L.A. next week.

||| Stream: “Trip The Mains”