The duo of Justin Stivers and Justin Gonzales met through a drunken Craiglist post—one the former bassist of the Antlers (Stivers) and the other long involved in the Brooklyn music scene. What came out of this musical in vino veritas-style meeting led to Pet Ghost Project which eventually ran its course and has reformed as Passenger Peru. A mainstay of Fleeting Youth Records‘ (excellent) stable, Passenger Peru just released their second full-length, Light Places, a meandering and sonically diverse twelve-song encapsulation of the occasional macabre aspect of aging. Peru deals in highly-functional genre blending, cleanly moving from psych to math to shoegaze elements, usually all in one song.
On “The Best Way To Drown”, Peru showcases this implicitly, taking four-plus minutes to romp around the initial song structure, only briefly ever fully returning to it. This is complimented by the fantastic video, directed and animated by Michela Buttignol. Taking the song title as inspiration for a beach scene, but also perhaps drowning in sound, Buttignol creates intensely stimulating images that interplay in a strange and wonderful manner with the track itself. Dealing in washed out beach-y visual aesthetic, the animation is kept to a fairly limited color palette; tans, blues, reds, and blacks dominate, keeping the video from ever dealing in trite psychedelia.
