Moody Beaches really aren’t messing around in their new music video.
Released today, the clip for the searing single ‘Counting Reasons’ powerfully contends with the ludicrously unfair expectations put on women in the music industry and society as a whole.
There probably won’t be a simpler but more effective deconstruction of this issue in music for the rest of the year. Wild Rose’s video at first focuses on the dolled up face of Moody Beaches’ vocalist Anna Lienhop, a maniacal smile stretched uncomfortable over her face; as the video progresses, her bandmates slowly strip away Lienhop’s makeup facade and shave her head, while her unsettling smile lingers.
It’s only at the end of the video, once she is stripped bare, that Lienhop’s smile slips, with the Moody Beaches trip staring intently at the camera.
Lienhop expanded on the vital matter at the heart of the band’s song and video to Tone Deaf. “Back in the day, in one of my earlier bands, one of the members said that feminism wasn’t necessary anymore,” she says. “I disagreed, but I had a hard time articulating the “why”.
“Since then I can articulate it, and I think that’s due to the conversation and presence that has been established over the last however many years, by many big brave brains.”
As Lienhop is keen to acknowledge, horrible humans “exist in every corner of the universe – even your stereotypical woke, left-of-field progressive can be problematic.”
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“We can’t escape them. But we can identify them. And we can have that dialogue. And we can change (hopefully),” she insists.
“The music “industry” (and let’s be honest, arts as a whole) likes to self-reflect and chew over the proverbial fat, and think it’s progressive and idealistic, but it’s a weird didactic. Music loves to call out shitty behaviour, but still secretly harbours and benefits from problematic people and systems that it’s integrated into.”
What Moody Beaches are asking in ‘Counting Reasons’, then, is if it might simply be better “if we strip it all back, get rid of the junk and start again.” It’s a hopeful idea, and one day it may even be a necessary one. As Lienhop sings in a stirring falsetto – pitched somewhere between the wonderful Kate Bush and a macho thrash metal belter – it’s hard to disagree with her.
‘Counting Reasons’ is the second taste of the profound post-punk outfit’s new album, Acid Ocean, which is set to be released on Friday, April 21st (pre-order here). It’s the follow-up to last year’s equally thunderous single ‘Crowded World’, and the trio are really excelling at the brooding quiet-loud dynamics that flourished in early ’90s rock.
If you want to hear Moody Beaches up close, they’ll be performing at PBS Drive Live next week, followed by a special all ages show at Thornbury Bowls Club on Sunday, April 2nd.
Moody Beaches’ ‘Counting Reasons’ is out now. Acid Ocean is out Friday, April 21st via Poison City Records/Beast Records (France).
