Entertainment
Video Premiere: Kisses’ “Control”
the video premiere
In "Control," the second single from California duo
' latest album
Rest In Paradise
, lead singer Jesse Kivel is lamenting the toll L.A.'s gnarled traffic is beginning to take on his relationship. "The lyrics allude to the west and east sides of Los Angeles, a drive that each year becomes more treacherous than the next," he's explained. But the song's gleeful video does not reflect those themes at all, and that was exactly the point. "My goal with this video was to put our dream team backing band behind us and to just shoot a straight forward, studio music video with that unconventional lineup," Kivel told us. To achieve that vision, Kisses, who is comprised of Kivel and bandmate Zinzi Edmundson teamed up with L.A. filmmaker Adrian Buitenhuis, who collaborated with the band on their 2013 video for "Huddle."
"Jesse had a very specific idea of what he wanted," Buitenhuis says. "No big story—just a straightforward band video shot in a studio performed in an earnest way." The result is a delightful performance clip that sees Kivel fronting a band of older gentlemen who look more at home behind their instruments than most of the pretenders in Brooklyn. "They dressed in the way I like to dress and had all the style and energy I would look for in my ideal backing band," Kivel says.
Buitenhuis continues: "That earnest/serious video seemed to be a real product of early mtv live session recordings, where music videos were really about the feeling of documenting that live moment when the magic of a song came together in the studio and we were privy to it. I pulled references ranging from spotlit Milli Vanilli Jams to The Who studio sessions to soft lit Taylor Swift videos and meta videos like those of Yacht and Maxim Ludwig, that also harkened back to the honeymoon period of music videos."
Check it out above
