Cream Premiere: Cloudmouth Breaks Free in 'Nice Looking Mountain' [Fresh Vid]

In the late spring, we premiered Cloudmouth's new album Dark Energy, which features a blend of styles that's tough to neatly categorize. Broadly, you could call it avant-folk, with touches of jazz and late-’60s pop among other things, and the direction any song might take isn't easy to predict — something that's interesting from a creative perspective, as well as a delight if you give it a chance. 

But when you're trying to make a living in a creative field, there's frequently a pull (or a push from outside forces) to change what you're doing or frame it in a particular way that makes it easier to digest. That's one source of the drama in a music video for the Dark Energy song "Nice Looking Mountain," which we're pleased to premiere today. Above, see the band (singer-guitarist Kyle Numann, drummer Amoretta Taylor and multi-instrumentalist Chris Wilson) in the process of filming a segment for a TV show. They struggle with the director (Jillian LaFave, who you might remember from the band Umbrella Tree), whose insistence that they be as cheerful as possible strains them to the breaking point.

“The concept for this video was a sort of absurdist psychedelic Hee Haw, where an earnest but dignified performing band gets pushed into a comically grotesque performance by an over-demanding studio director,” says Numann in an email to the Cream. "The theme of the song follows this thread. I think of it as an anthem about the challenge of maintaining a healthy mental state — or the lack thereof. I made the props myself, and the editing was done by myself and our cello/synth/bass player Chris Wilson.”

If that leaves you intrigued, you can see Cloudmouth in person on Friday night, when they play an early show at The Basement with Basic Printer. (The differences between the two bands seem to have been generating some (good-natured) internet friction.) The show starts at 7 p.m. and the cover is $6 in advance or $8 at the door. Keep an eye on the Facebook event page for more.