North Carolinian songwriter Drake Margolnick had been kicking around Charlotte for a number of years before getting together with some local musicians to form Flagship. Taking their cues from bands such as Fleet Foxes and Department of Eagles, they wade through a landscape of bucolic folk beauty and sustained pop release and have been steadily building a locla and national fanbase since being voted Best Local Band for Charlotte Magazines‘s 2013 Bob Awards. For their recently released self-titled debut, they brought producer Ben Allen (Animal Collective, Youth Lagoon) into the fold and built upon their pop base by adding sweeping orchestral flourishes — taking the band somewhere into the murky no man’s land between indie pop grandeur and broader classical aesthetics.
For the video to recent single, “Break The Sky,” the band melds Margolnick’s soaring vocals, a blend of acoustic and electric instrumentation, and a thudding percussive blast that wouldn’t feel out of place gracing the backlines of an Arcade Fire song with striking visuals describing a complicated tale of desperation, loneliness, and hope — not to mention a yearned-for reflexive catharsis. We see clips of the band roaring through the song juxtaposed against this intimate tale of one man’s journey through the night — though he may not actually be as alone as he thinks. Playing off of Margolnick’s rafter-raising voice, the song feels overwhelming but not overly sentimental or manipulative. The band balances these arena theatrics with a communal approach, and the video works to the band’s strengths of plying hard-wrought emotion from vibrant pop construction.
Beats Per Minute is pleased to premiere the video for “Break The Sky,” taken from Flagship’s recently released self-titled debut LP.
