We first caught Sydney Eloise & The Palms at Savannah Stopover back in March, where the sextet from Atlanta charmed us with their golden-age-of-pop songcraft. The group released their debut album, Faces, last fall, and today we’re pleased to be premiering the video for the song’s opening cut, “Always Sailing.”
It’s a tidy showcase of what the group does best, re-drawing the romantic grandeur of the “Be My Little Baby” beat as a paean to devotion. Eloise treats her melody with a sense of bemusement, skirting near sweetness before pivoting away at the last moment in a move that recalls Neko Case at her most in-command. The Palms, meanwhile, decorate the space behind her with twinkling keys and guitars that wash ashore before receding back. There might be a touch of pastiche to what they’re doing here, but “Always Sailing” is a sturdy, perfectly constructed pop song.
The video, which was shot on Super 8, echoes a bit of the song’s nostalgia. “‘Always Sailing’ was the first song we worked on together, and that spark set the whole record into motion,” the band says via email.
We were watching a lot of The Wonder Years as we were finishing the record,” the band says via email. “The home movie segments of the show feature so many iconic shots of seemingly inconsequential things happening, and the thing that comes across that makes those moments so memorable is that they don’t seem forced. They pointed the camera, they pressed record, and you got what you got. That was the idea, anyway. Before we had twenty-five filters to choose from, we had three minutes of Kodak: the camera points at you, you smile and wave, and that’s what was charming. It was real, every time. After months of obsessing over every tiny detail that appears on the record, we thought it would be an interesting experiment to hand over the reigns of control. We decided to shoot on Super 8 and just let the medium be the message – just a few friends enjoying the weekend.
Take a look below.
