Fresh from being featured on our Best EPs of 2020 list, the Ohio emotive hardcore band Closedown have a new visual to accompany “To Shake with the Earth”, the standout track from Bask in the Dancing Light.
An incendiary fusion of post-hardcore’s winding menace and post-rock’s atmosphere and grandiose emotional carthasis, it’s a track that inspired Erik Ratensperger, of recently reformed Connecticut screamo legends Jerome’s Dream, to create a visual that “complimented the song’s feelings of isolation and sadness, but with a glimmer of hope and an eventual arrival of peace and happiness.”
The video, which you can watch below, intersperses and overlays live footage of the band and natural imagery, with snow falling as guitars twinkle during the song’s tension-building bridge.
According to the band, the song is about “the ecological guilt and denial of responsibility one experiences when forced to participate in a vampiric economic system” as a climate crisis rages all around. It all culminates in the fundamental question: “could the cog kill the machine?”
Closedown’s musical attack matches the intensity of the lyrics throughout, but the song ends on a note of bittersweet hope, wherein the value of human connection is expressed in stark terms: “I’ve never felt more alive than here lying with you / I’ve never felt more alive than here dying with you.”
There’s an acknowledgement of the smallness of the individual, but also of the existential comfort in knowing that, even if you aren’t going to change the world, you could still change your life, or the lives of those around you, for the better. With songs like this, Closedown may not be saving the world from ecological disaster, but they are doing their part to enrich our lives.
Closedown’s Bask in the Dancing Light is available on their Bandcamp. You can follow them on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
