Music

Canadian premiere: Watch the video for Calgary noir-rock act Florida BC’s new single Thunder Jesus

Ever have that late-night, lonely-prairie-road feeling?

Like, anything could happen and none of it good.

That’s the mood Calgary quartet Florida BC capture on their newest single Thunder Jesus, which they’ve just released a video for and theYYSCENE is pleased to offer the exclusive Canadian premiere of.

The opening track from their their debut album, Salt Breaker Sand, it’s a relentlessly bluezy, swampy, sludgey work of foreboding wonder that sets up the rest of the record quite brilliantly.

Expect big things from the foursome of Clinton St. John, Jeff MacLeod, Carl Davison and Morgan Greenwood when the album is released in September.

The song was written by St. John in early January of 2019. He had just finished re-watching the first Twin Peaks series over the holidays. Also fresh on his mind was the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada after having been part of a collective art installation in December that acknowledged these missing women. Subsequently, this song and video have the mutual perspective of a missing girl and that of her ghost. The song was recorded by Florida BC in Montreal in February 2019.

The video, which was shot by director Stephen Burchill, manages to capture that feel quite beautifully — stark, bleak, spooky and very Lynchian.

Burchill says of the shoot: “I’d just moved back from Berlin in Winter 2019 when Jeff showed me the early mixes from he and Clint’s new project. He floated the idea about possibly doing a music video for the new album. I was looking for a new project as it was and fell in love with the mixes they’d put together, so I was in. Jeff had an loose idea for the track that we ended up shooting, Thunder Jesus. We knew it was going to be a dark, highway road narrative so we needed to find the right car, as it was essentially a character, as well as a personification of malintent.

“Serendipitously a good friend of ours, Curtis Poulsen, happened to have a mint condition 1977 Cadillac El Dorado Biarritz, in black, just sitting under a tarp in a garage. Perfect. I’d always wanted to use the HWY 22/Cowboy Trail/Longview area as a backdrop for some photography or film and this project coincided perfectly. We ended up shooting over a couple of weekends in late spring/early summer 2019 on a shoestring budget with the help of our friends and some fortunate weather. Also the staff at Twin Cities Saloon in Longview were super kind to us and helped us out. The burger they have there is the worth the drive alone.”

Enjoy the video and song.

(Photo courtesy Sebastian Buzzalino.)

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