It’s always interesting to see bands experiment with the artform of the music video. To accompany their new single “Question”, brilliant alt-country/slowcore formation Classic Water opted to take a more long form approach. We watch frontman TJ Gerritsen gradually dig a one-cubic-meter hole in an abandoned field, wearing a white suit. What’s the point you might ask?
“With this video we wanted to portray steady decline and exhaustion, amid a landscape that evokes an eerie, menacing, post-apocalyptic feeling,” Gerritsen says of the idea. “The end of the video will then raise many questions among the viewers who stuck around until the end – the video lasts over an hour, so the question is how many people that will be.”
Whether you have patience or not to see the whole thing (I imagine someone like Phil Elverum spends his free time doing exactly these type of things), you have to admit the setting of the video is a great accompany to the music, which fades in and out as Gerritsen plows through the dirt, grimacing. On a side note; it’s pretty incredible how white he keeps his garments throughout these exertions. “Question” is a soothing elementary song of undeniable splintered beauty, but there’s something quite eerie and ‘off’ about it too, especially the way the synths sputter out like a faltering MRI machine.
“Love is something like water / something we’d never realized we could miss,” Gerritsen opens in the song, asking whether he has engaged with joy enough throughout his lifetime. It’s a moving outline of love persevering through the toils of regret, not unlike the David Berman poem Classic Water was named after. The inner realist eternally at odds with the inner romantic; as things start falling apart, how do we make peace with the expanding void within us?
Gerritsen had plenty of questions of his own after writing the song. “How does the invisible relate to the visible? Why do I let myself, on most of my days, be so easily guided by trivial matters while being blind to what truly matters? Is it even possible to shape one’s life around intangible things? These are the questions at the heart of ‘Question,’ a song I wrote while somewhere, deep within my mind, an echo of Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel wandered.“
A greater certainty is the release of Classic Water’s upcoming album Matter of Time, released on February 16, 2024. Watch the video for “Question” below, or, if you want to hear the condensed version, find the song on streaming outlets.
Follow Classic Water on Instagram, Facebook and their official website.
