5 days ago
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La Dispute have unveiled the video for the song “Sibling Fistfight at Mom’s Fiftieth / The Un-sound” — Act 3 from their forthcoming concept album No One Was Driving the Car, out September 5th.
The track continues the highly detailed narrative set into motion with the album’s previous singles, which encompassed Acts 1 and 2, and is the most bite-sized and song-y of the bunch so far. Jordan Dreyer’s spoken-word delivery takes on more of a bark here, as the band pick up the pace and reach the track’s conclusion before the five-minute mark (for context, the previous single “Environmental Catastrophe Film” was nearly double that duration).
As he did with the prior singles, Dreyer provided a lengthy statement via press release detailing this portion of the album’s narrative, pasted here verbatim:
“the next act encompasses in more focused detail the narrator’s look backwards down the path, beginning at their shared home in the present day, where the dissociation introduced in act one as almost entirely a self-inclosed thing trickles outward and troubles the comfort outlined in the last section of the song preceding it. he examines his own life through imagined self-portraits, in various sequences of time (fractions of days first, then weeks, months, years), and through multiple specific events. from there, four critically influential events from his earlier life are detailed in four songs:
first, a story from his early teenage years, where he and his brother—up north hunting with their father in the area where he and his own brother (the boys’ uncle, who has long lived far away elsewhere), and their father (who died when they were young)—stumble upon what they believe to be an abandoned paramilitary compound. in the middle of the field beside it they come to a hole dug in the ground full of deer carcasses. the narrator becomes fixated on the bodies below, unable to break his gaze from them, while the brother continues on toward the compound, a metaphor both for their diverging paths and for the obsessions/explanations that motivated them to take which ones they did.
the second song happens a few years later, at their mother’s fiftieth birthday party, where several siblings—drunk and airing internal grievances—fight on the basement staircase while their mother contemplates what role her own actions as a parent played in their arrival at that moment and in the conflicted history that led up to it. in the second half of the song, the siblings are gathered at the parents’ house again, years after the fight, for a quarterly group birthday celebration for several of their own children.
the third song occurs years on from there, with a pitch made to the partner of the narrator—working through undergrad at the time—from purveyors of a multi-level marketing company central to the history of grand rapids, and in some ways inextricably entwined with the christian reformed church mentioned earlier on the record (somewhat importantly, the rapture is invoked at the very end of the song, in a section discussing extraordinary wealth).
the final song centers around the friend whose funeral appeared earlier in act two, and is presented as reflections of their shared experiences together in youth, chiefly a snowy night drifting in a car together across an empty church parking lot, and the crash that occurred when the car spun on ice to slide sidelong into a curb and embankment. the end of the song harkens back heavily to the second section of act two (the song “Environmental Catastrophe Film”) and represents a full-circle consideration of the control dictated to him via exposure to calvinist teachings in childhood.”
Along with the unveiling of Act 3, La Dispute also announced an art exhibition set to open September 3rd in the band’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
For the exhibit, the band collaborated with 10 visual artists to craft “actualized pieces from the faux painting titles listed in the lyrics of ‘Self-Portrait Backwards.'” There will also be an assortment of traditional media pieces created for the album art by bassist Adam Vass. Entitled “Exhibition: Work in Progress,” the collection will be on display through October 4th at Morning Ritual in Grand Rapids.
Meanwhile, La Dispute will be supporting the album with a run of North American tour dates that kick off the day the album drops on September 5th in Detroit. Get tickets here.
Below you can stream the video for “Sibling Fistfight at Mom’s Fiftieth / The Un-sound.”
English (US) · 