In Toot Sweet’s new video for “Stations,” a multi-faceted romantic conflict between land and sea, past and present, away and home, takes place in accordion funk outfit. The track is a slow moving, dramatic opus of stop-and-go. Double bass backing and oozing accordion chords bolster frontlady Mary Spencer Knapp’s vocals as they build up and burst and build up again throughout. The video, directed by Knapp and Rod Morata, opens with Knapp awakening in her bed to find ghostly pirate figures, whom she follows out the door on a seafaring voyage, which dances between the past and present, the living and the dead. As she steps through her sliding glass door to the outside, the color video transforms into an old-timey, granular black and white vaudevillian film visual, and we’re taken on a trip through time. Choral backings come in and out before a clean guitar replaces every other instrument beneath Knapp’s singing, creating a tremendous hollowness in the background, and highlighting her vocal power. Dramatic swells as grandiose as the ocean itself occur in the chorus, as Knapp hopelessly, heartily laments, “Do you know the way home from here? It’s getting dark and I’m afraid of fear.” A girl, an accordion, the ocean, and the past are intertwined to make a powerful visual accompaniment to a uniquely theatrical track. You can see Toot Sweet live at The Bowery Electric on August 21. – JP Basileo
