Words by Jason Lee
Video stills below from music video directed by John Mattiuzzi and Omer Gal
Roll over Gustav Holst tell Earth, Wind & Fire the news—the latest musical masterwork with Jupiter as its subject matter has arrived, or did in late 2022 at least, namely “Jupiter Rising” a song by the merry band of pranksters known as Cookie Tongue that’s been bestowed with a brand new fan-funded video clip perfectly capturing the mystically eerie yet alluring vibe of the song itself…
…fading in on a swirling surge of orangey-red noise as if suddenly dropped into the eye of the eternal anticyclonic storm that forms the planet Jupiter’s high-pressure beauty mark before segueing into a hypnotically loping doom-folky acoustic guitar groove delicately coated in glockenspiel tintinnabulations by Jacquelyn Marie Shannon who’s also crediting with co-writing the song and playing “spoons hanging off a stick” with the resulting vibe being halfway between anxious and sedated which together induce a blissed-out state in the average listener…
….an impression that’s only heightened by the whale calls and/or creaky bike wheels inserted subliminally below the instruments and emotive warblings with a couple breakdown sections that bring “Jupiter Rising” into experimental horror soundtrack territory with Book of the Dead incantations culminating in a whisper-to-a-scream climax with cascading drum fills and bass flourishes and thunder and lightning (perhaps supplied by Jupiter a.k.a. the God of Thunder) and frenzied howling into the void that is until the void emerges victorious like it always does but hey it’s a good trip getting there…
…so in other words the song is nothing less than a journey and so is the video too with bandleader Omer Gal leading his band of journeymen and assorted hominids across a bleakly ravishing Charles Samuel Addams-esque terrain of gnarled tree branches and burnt out underbrush as the grey blanket of cloud cover breaks to reveal a half moon hanging in the dusky sky with the planet Jupiter looming ominously behind about a hundred times bigger than it should be as if it somehow it got pulled close enough to Earth’s orbit to swallow our planet alive which wouldn’t be without precedent…
…with the gravitational pull in question likely caused by Cookie Tongue themselves festooned as they are in ragamuffin finery and smudged goth-clown makeup and skeletal capes made of discarded sparking TV antennas no doubt tuned to interstellar frequencies and with the help of some leftover dryer lint and buttons plucked from dolls’ eyes (don’t ask, we just know) they perform some sort of planet-summoning ritual on a high mountain outcropping opening up a fiery portal that sucks poor Omer right into Jupiter’s Big Red Cyclonic Beauty Mark and we haven’t even gotten to the glowing gooey kewpie doll formed of primordial ooze stuffed into the jaws of a copperhead’s suspended carcass yet…
…so yeah suffice to say the video is a little trippy which is right up our alley and if it’s up your alley too we recommend brewing up some Earl Grey to go with your Cookie Tongue and joining this Mad Hatter’s tea party as directed by filmmaker and visual effects specialist John Mattiuzzi in tandem with Omer Gal with the results serving as a perfect compliment to the song itself and to the band’s equally whimsical tho’ generally not quite as apocalyptic live shows which are more like Pee Wee’s Playhouse if H.R. Giger were the set designer but focused more on hand-crafted Punch ‘n’ Judy style puppet shows than slimy penis monsters with acid for blood and when it comes to Mattiuzzi and Gal’s first directorial team-up it’s akin to Terry Gilliam meets Ari Aster meets George Méliès as long as we’re playing this game…
…and finally just by way of background research much like the Merry Pranksters themselves Cookie Tongue is a long-running peripatetic project that’s migrated home bases over the years from the artsy enclave of San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood to a studio apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn where “Jupiter Rising” was first demoed (a demo you can hear in part over the video’s closing credits) to their current HQ in New Orleans, Louisiana…
…a perfect fit given the city’s well-known carnivalesque approach to life and art and for a little deeper dive into Cookie Tongue’s history and the recording process of “Jupiter Rising” and the making of the video check out this recent interview with Omer especially if you’re a Sagittarius or a Pisces which makes Jupiter your ruling planet or simply if you appreciate the weird-ass badassery of the song’s titular Roman god and then watch out for more CT releases possibly coming later this year and scheduled festival appearances in 2024 at Asheville Fringe in March and The New Orleans Giant Puppet Fest in April…
“Jupiter Rising” was engineered and mixed by Lily Wen at Figure 8 Studios, Brooklyn, NY
Mastered by Jeff Lipton and Maria Rice at Peerless Mastering, Boston, MA
The song was written by Omer Gal with the help of Jacquelyn Marie Shannon of Cookie Tongue
Omer Gal – Vocals, Acoustic Guitar and Percussion
Jules M Dooley – Viola and Modular Synth
Nathan Repasz – Drums
Chris Corrente – Bass
Eddie Raison – Electric Guitar
Jacquelyn Marie Shannon – Glockenspiel and Spoons hanging off a stick