Among the most remarkable qualities of the new Death Blues record Ensemble—and there are a lot of them—is that it's a uniquely visual album. That's reflected, of course, in its packaging, which pairs the LP with a hefty, photo-laden hardcover book, but also in the music itself, thanks to the cinematic accompaniments of William Ryan Fritch, a film composer by trade. It's hard to listen to these sprawling arrangements without imaging a corresponding visual component, and now, thanks to the first video from the record, we don't have to imagine. The Kaveh Soofi-directed video for "Languaging" runs with the album's dominant motif of masks, cycling through dozens of images of stationary, fake faces. Some are whimsical; others are grotesque, but even the most uncanny of them register as unmistakably human. Inanimate objects or not, they're starring directly at us, so we can't help but return their gaze.
You can stream the video below, and the album right below that.
