Over the course of Speedy Ortiz's burgeoning career, the band has used music videos not to reinforce the messages of their songs, but as a way to let surreal visions run wild. "American Horror," off of last year's Real Hair EP, featured clashing supernatural images that sprouted from the imaginations of the band members; the first video from the band's recently released Foil Deer,"The Graduates," saw the group ingesting googly eyes representing psychotropic drugs and singing karaoke with someone wearing a giant white rabbit suit.
But that was just a warmup.
The new video for "Raising The Skate"---the best song off that new record, which has been touted as a defiant mission statement from lead singer Sadie Dupuis---gets even more specific. It's full of references to the unsettling and blood-soaked 1977 Japanese cult horror film Hausu, along with a few other nods to Dario Argento's Suspiria. "I love campy horror and was hell-bent on doing a Hausu send-up," says Dupuis, who met video director Casey Herz after playing a show "in the basement of his feminist punk house" in Boston. "I guess the idea of this video is that sometimes your problems seem like a gargantuan homicidal cat monster, but maybe your problems are really more like a regular cuddly LOLcat."**
Like other staples of the midnight movie circuit, Nobuhiko Obayashi's film is less a cinematic masterpiece than an experience, much like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Room. But Dupuis says there's a kernel of meaning connecting her and Herz's love of horror films and the fiery vocals: "A 'final girl' horror trope fit well with the song's lyrics about a woman asserting herself to cast off the haters and naysayers." The result is an homage to absurd cult horror classics that makes Dupuis' self-assured, anthemic chorus even more memorable.
