One would hope by now that Kelley Deal is well past “the other one” syndrome. In the mid ‘80s, she was offered the drum stool in the Pixies when her sister Kim joined as bass player, but opted for a computer programming career. Years later, the latter Deal formed the Breeders as a side band with Throwing Muses’ Tanya Donelly, and when Donelly bailed to form Belly, Kim brought her twin sister back into music as lead guitarist, despite her novice status with that instrument. That inexperience proved to be no demerit; the thusly-reconstituted Breeders made the stone classic album Last Splash and the indelible single “Cannonball.”
After cleaning up from a drug bust that put the Breeders on ice for a while, Deal found plenty to do. Her eponymous band the Kelley Deal 6000 released a couple of fine albums in the mid ‘90s (and became slightly infamous for a cover of Boyd Rice’s “Total War”), then she formed the Last Hard Men with Smashing Pumpkins’ Jimmy Chamberlin, the Frogs’ Jimmy Flexion, and—I shit you not—Sebastian Bach of Skid Row. She’s been back in the Breeders fold in the 21st Century, mostly with no side projects to speak of, but in 2012, coincident with the reunion of the Breeders’ Last Splash lineup, she also released a single with R. Ring, a new band with Mike Montgomery of the Cincinnati post-rock band Ampline. (GOHIO!)
R. Ring have been quietly putting out small releases of noisy indie-pop for a few years. There’s been little hype and no LP yet, but their debut 7” was followed quickly by a fun cover of DEVO’s “Mr. DNA” and a 4-song EP. This year, the duo is contributing a song each to two split 7”s, one with Murray, KY’s grimy reverb-psych superheroes Qualibones, and one with the justly revered Detroit noise rockers Protomartyr. Their song on the latter record is what concerns us today. it’s called “Loud Underneath,” and it’s our pleasure at DM to debut that video today.
Animated by painter and video artist Cy Gavin, the video’s imagery was inspired by the Paul Klee painting “Pavillion.” As he relates it himself:
When Kelley told me that Paul Klee’s journals inspired some of the lyrics, I also looked to Klee for inspiration. I found his painting “Pavilion” really captivating, so I used this highly stylized painting as a starting point to create an imaginary space. I was also told some of the lyrics were about sex—not having it and then finally having it. I wanted to find a way to show that anticipation. I had been staring at the computer and trying to write, so began seeing the blinking cursor as representative of a pulsing and excited anticipation of a moment of truth.
I wouldn’t have picked that up, about the cursor—the first association that hit me when I watched the video was side-scrolling platform games. By the way, if that image in the video of the knitted cross-section of a human head looks familiar to you, you’re clearly a regular DM reader—our Martin Schneider wrote a feature about that object’s creator Emily Stoneking just a little over a week ago.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Cuddly and gross knitted dissection specimens
Kelley Deal, Kristian Svitak and Mike Montgomery cover Devo’s ‘Mr. DNA’
