Let’s set aside the video for a moment because it really is ancillary to the discussion that needs to be had, which is, namely, if you’re any sort of fan of oddball garage pop, you’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re not listening to Antlered Aunt Lord, aka Athens artist Jesse Stinnard (also of Tunabunny). His frazzled, fuzz-heavy anthems carry with them shades of Dinosaur Jr. and Guided By Voices, both masters of grainy fidelity rock with an air of quirky transcendence. I’m not quite prepared to place Stinnard in that rarefied company, but suffice it to say the two tracks presented here, taken from his latest LP, Ostensibly Formerly Stunted (and on fire), are both cut from that same gloriously off-kilter cloth.
As for the video, well, it kind of speaks for itself. Depending on your take, director Ted Kuhn’s work is either fabulously surreal or almost militantly weird. For three and a half minutes the viewer is presented with upside-down footage of a man (Stinnard?) dressed in a red Teletubbies suit (Po!), walking and emphatically waving across a verdant park. That pretty much all that happens until “Questions From Our Publicist” begins to fade out and the video cuts to a closing shot of the empty Teletubbies suit atop a garbage can. I suppose it’s possible to psychoanalyze the video as some sort of meditation on discarding your past and forgoing nostalgia, but whatever. For me, this one is all about the music, and it sounds damn fine.
Ostensibly Formerly Stunted (and on fire) is available now via HHBTM Records.
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