Perhaps the uncomforting qualities of the visually unappealing lie solely in the reality of their subjects; an artist can breathe new life into a vile scene by reimagining it as a cartoon, a sculpture or any medium, really, and create quite a different outcome. Wild Moth explores all things unsightly in their new video for the their track, “Buried”, (off last year’s Inhibitor LP released on Iron Pier), rendering universally off-putting scenes into stop-motion clay creations that are curious, if not cute, at their worst. Coming off a recent US tour, Wild Moth found themselves dealing with some inner turmoil, climaxing with one of their founding members moving from their Bay Area home base, to New York. The video, created and directed by their good friend Lauren Corden, echoes the band’s struggle with such a wrench in their gears, and so soon after the proud release of their record.
The visuals follow an earthworm, something of an unassuming hero, through an underworld of clay atrocities, spanning dystopian landscapes of misshapen hills and sad looking trees, to flowers blooming with eyeballs at their pollen centers and underwater anemones swaying in the wind, to the age-old image of eating its way through an apple (in the not-so-age-old setting of space). The trypophobic holes created and entered into are disquieting, but it’s never so bad as what’s described. Even when the subject matter is taken to subterranean levels and we get a nice close-up of a fly-covered pile of shit, or maggots going above and below the ground, the fact that it’s “just” clay, and the shaping and reshaping of the images, somehow makes it bearable, maybe even pleasant to look at. A beauty is found in the artist’s meticulous handiwork, while the satisfaction of ascending punk riffs and cool vocal gloom reverberates in the background.
