Bootblacks – Birds [2⊘13]

With a furious fusion of delightfully dark and explosively effusive gothic jazz, Bootblacks’ “Birds” is truly one of the most beautiful and unique music videos ever produced, even apparently filmed live. It should therefore surprise no one that the sparse though richly-imbued lyrics would be equally unique, cryptically mimicking the video’s dreamy surreality, with hints alone to hone their implied meaning.

“I dwell in possibility
With malice and civilized hands
Sweet regret, ivory eyes regret
A horizon’s last breath”

The term “Bootblack” is actually a more colorfully eloquent term for a shoeshiner and yet a strong and proper name for a Brooklyn, New York-based post-punk goth band with influences born of Joy Division, The Cure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Thusly made up of guitarist Alli Gorman and vocalist Panther MacDonald, with the further addition of Barrett Hiatt on drums and Peter Mavrogeorgis on bass, the band members’ diverse backgrounds and musical tastes infuse their sound with a sense of experimentation and unpredictability artfully present within this very track.

Bootblacks photo of band members in mostly black and white.

“Children hide away on distant shores
Wander gather paradise
These myths are meant to touch
So pull the curtains tight”

Of the many attributable meanings to the enigmatic lyrics several literary works are reminiscent. Some elements seem reflective of “A Clockwork Orange“, while others a farther stretch to the mythical Persephone and the sirens (originally half woman, half bird) sent to unsuccessfully save her from kidnapping and queening in the underworld by Hades, with perhaps the most salient being relatable to “The Lord of the Flies” and its children lost to their self-desolate island to rebuild society in their own flagrantly flawed image. The beauty of such lyrics lying mostly in the individual interpretation, especially in juxtaposition to such stark raving music and blazing visual imagery.

“Lost cities they play hide and seek
Remembered in suspended scenes
Wasteful kings are meant to sleep
So wipe the ashes from your eyes”

The music here has a nearly cataclysmic feel with such see-saw mechanistic motion, a near roiling nautical effect, as a ship stormed over an ocean to be dashed upon deadly shores. This would seem to lend credence to a more literal interpretation of actual mythical sirens in figurative fervor drawing a ship’s sailors to their inevitable doom through divine wanton temptation. A climax in a cacophony of clustered pyres by design.

“Sirens they burn in front of me”