Video: Media Jeweler, ‘Tightrope’

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Media Jeweler

Orange County-bred avant-rockers Media Jeweler — or, purveyors of jazzy-post-punk-DIY-dippy doo, as we thought upon hearing their first album “$99 R/T Hawaii” in 2015 — return in August with their third album.

It’s titled “The Sublime Sculpture of Being Alive” and arrives three years after their sophomore “1-800-SUCCEED.” And unlike its largely instrumental predecessors, the album puts into words its explorations of what singer-guitarist Sam Farzin calls the “manic experience of being alive.”

But nothing in the band’s highly conceptual discourse on their “Sculpture” prepares you for the video for “Tightrope,” directed by Eddie Ramos and starring Jonny Higa as a person hopscotching through life. It’s as perfect a metaphor as we’ve run across in a while.

“This track came about when there was a miscommunication about when band practice was starting, so Jac [Aranda, the guitarist] and I got there about an hour before the rhythm section,” Farzin says of the shape-shifting track. “I had been noodling on the main progression earlier in the day at home and started playing it. We immediately fell into the disjointed twin-melodies and the recorded motif’s not a far cry from that original sketch. The lyrics were written shortly after a brief but eerie power outage in Atwater Village worthy of a Calvino plotline.”

Guest vocalists Paul Frunzi and Allyson Foster are there on “Tightrope” for the call-and-response. Frunzi (Ever Ending Kicks) and Foster join saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi, Jo Hirabayashi (Jo Passed), Colin Knight, Sam Sarty (Living Hour), Megan Siebe (Cursive), Roy Werner (G.S. Sultan) and Stephen Heath and Miles Wintner (L.A. Takedown) as guests on the album. They join Farzin, Aranda, bassist Thom Lucero, drummer Bryson Mounts and new member Graham Ulicny (The Faint) on an album that was engineered by Ulicny.

“Tightrope” follows last month’s release of the first single “Helicopter.”

The album is out Aug. 13 via Fire Talk Records.

And kudos to whoever did the chalk work.

||| Watch: The video for “Tightrope”

||| Also: Watch the video for “Helicopter”

||| Previously: “Hula Hoop,” “Motivate,” “Autopilot”