LEPROUS’ NEW VIDEO IS INSPIRING ME TO BATHE MYSELF WITH A FISH, TOO

The new video for “Restless” by Leprous — aka Ihshan’s live backing band — is a doozy. It’s given me with an opportunity to remember why I liked Bilateral enough to premiere a track from it back in August; it’s also really… fucking… weird.

The press release touting the “Restless” video boasts that the band “expect[s] you to understand the entire chain of events during the first watching.” Well, I’ve watched this thing three times now and I still have no idea what the fuck is going on. Help me out here.

First, swamp man emerges from the muck. Meanwhile, some other dude is bathing himself in the shower with a fish and some old man is walking through the forest with a platter. While all of this is going on, another guy is making sandwiches in his kitchen, but then decides he’d prefer his sandwiches in cake form, so he sticks them into a blender and bakes a cake with the ensuing mixture. THEN, swamp man — who’s been gorging on sticks and mud in the woods intermittently through all of this — comes to cake guy’s apartment, only to be sucker-punched with a boxing glove when he accepts the cake as a gift. What happened to fish/shower guy? All these storylines tie together how, exactly? Can I get a “WHAT THE FUCK!?” in the house??

Now, there MUST be some sort of allegory or metaphor here… but I ain’t seein’ it. In any case, the video is really well shot, and the visual effect in the performance footage segments is especially cool.

So… yeah. That happened.

-VN