Renee LoBue in Elk City’s video for “Dream on Tip Toe.”
The dynamic Jersey-based band Elk City has had a productive September with the release of its new single “Dream on Tip Toe” — which will be featured on its Souls in Space EP, due out Oct. 11 on the Bar/None label — along with an engaging video of the song. You can watch the video below.
The impressionistic video features singer Renee LoBue and guitarist Sean Eden (also of Luna) playing two people who aren’t sure whether to embrace their attraction to each other or resist it. Licking on a cup of luscious ice cream, LoBue leads us down a flight of stairs into a dream or maybe a nightmare, while singing “tip toe through geraniums is where we want to be/Relax, we’re almost there, floating into air … each wish becomes a dream with you, or so it seems/Who are the winners here? Me and you, my dear.”
Her haunting voice repeats, “every night I go to sleep and dream about falling in your arms again with no way out.”
Elk City pairs soul-baring, introspective lyrics with inventive rock ‘n’ roll. This latest single makes me contemplate the lover with “no way out.” Did the person in this song and video hope to escape from this space (underground in the video, where the actors seem lost) or was she content to have no way out, allowing herself to fall fully into her lover’s arms?
“The video becomes exploratory … it is that duality that becomes the ‘wrestle’ of the listener’s (and viewer’s) mind,” said LoBue.
Directed by Ketchem and LoBue, this film represents one of many creative endeavors shared by these two friends of many years. Ketchem and Jon Reino filmed the footage, which was edited at Magic Door Recording, a studio owned by Ketchem. They used the studio as “our home during the filming because it was so near to the club,” said Ketchem.
The song was mixed at Magic Door but recorded at Ketchem’s prior studio, Orange Road Recording, while Magic Door was being built.
LoBue called the the video “part Northern NJ Cult mystery, part Fellini outtake, part ‘Blair Witch Project,’ ” and said “we loved making the ‘Dream on Tip Toe’ video at a true Montclair treasure: the underground punk club, The Meat Locker.”
This summer, I caught Elk City playing at an outdoor festival, Montclair Center Stage Fest 2019, at which LoBue sang a set of lyrically haunting and rhythmically powerful songs from their fifth album, Everybody’s Insecure (2018), and I got a preview of “Dream on Tip Toe,” which had a powerful rocky edge, and another unreleased song, “Your Time Doesn’t Exist.”
Co-founded by LoBue and Ketchem, Elk City also features keyboardist Carl Baggaley, guitarist Chris Robertson and bassist Richard Baluyut (also of Versus).
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