Douglas Martin orders Henny and Ginger Ale at the Regal Beagle.
In the circles associated with Douglas Martin Music, the word “psychedelic” has become a near-meaningless catch-phrase. Basically anything which could be described as hazy or sort of peculiar is immediately bestowed the psychedelic tag. It’s exactly like when you see someone in a pair of big glasses and a thrift shop top and want to call them a hipster (or Macklemore, which is a far more insulting criticism).
Regal Degal is a hazy and sort of peculiar band who I would not describe as psychedelic, but their visuals for “Pyramid Bricks” would insist otherwise. A balmy, slow-motion video with multi-hued backlights certainly fits the bill of surface psychedelia, and if it contained just those elements, we’d basically have half the indie-rock videos produced in the past three or four years. Under Lily X’s direction, however, the video is given an aesthetic and a series of images that brings the gauze and float of the music to the forefront, rendering the song and accompanying visuals inseparable.
There are ancient Egyptian drawings and artifacts, little girls in Cleopatra costumes, singer/guitarist Josh da Costa’s luxurious bird’s nest of hair, lockers full of quicksand, Abbey Lee Kershaw dressed as an Egyptian queen (and then eventually getting her heart taken out and put in a jar), da Costa singing on a freight elevator, dancers wearing paper horse heads, a disco ball for some reason(?), literal pyramid tits, and da Costa making out with a mummy. Somewhere out there, some intrepid music magazine intern is writing a thinkpiece on whether or not the latter qualifies as necrophilia.
Watching the video on loop (especially if you’re stoned or otherwise on similarly mind-altering drugs) lowers you into a dream-like trance, a place where the song (and a good portion of Regal Degal’s upcoming album) exists comfortably. It would have been a surefire hit in the heyday of MTV; its picturesque, bizarro world and 80’s proto-alternative veneer perfect for smoking some weed and parking in front of the television to watch music videos all day.
And the song is as mesemerizing as the video, which bodes well for Regal Degal’s forthcoming LP (Not Now, to be released on May 19th). So long as an actress/model/queen/mummy doesn’t crystallize in front of the speaker while the album plays. Scratch that last thought. I might enjoy something like that.
