“Music is our strongest antidote to feelings of emptiness and disquiet,” Caspian guitarist Phil Jamieson says. He’s talking about his band’s decision to carry on after the 2013 death of bassist Chris Friedrich. But it’s a principle that applies more generally, and the music that the Massachusetts post-rock band makes—dreamy, heavy, and freighted with nostalgia—gives that emptiness articulation and definition. It may not change the circumstances of life, but all that scrawling on the cave walls sometimes ends up transforming into a kind of buttress.
It’s a concept that’s built into the video for “Sad Heart of Mine,” from 2015’s Dust and Disquiet. The video, which was created by FLOOD contributor Marc Lemoine, is comprised of anonymous moments sourced from over 500 hours of home video footage Lemoine purchased on eBay and edited down into a tidy five minutes. Even without the backstory, there’s a sense of sadness that emanates from the clip. The implied weight of all those mundane moments from lives that have already come and flashed and gone weighs here in negative; you feel it—and these people—because of their absence. As the season changes and the days get shorter, and as the world outside becomes more and more macabre, this is the excellently appointed house in which we live. Check it out below.
