“The Unraveled,” the new music video from ash.ØK premieres today. It’s the title track from his forthcoming debut album The Unraveled. Hailing from Pennsylvania, ash.ØK, aka Ashok Kailath, is a producer who collaborates with talented artists to create singular, imaginative music.
Stylistically, ash.ØK isn’t easily pigeonholed into a specific genre because he integrates a vast array of styles into a unique sound that is his and his alone. Blending elements of electronic dance, world music, progressive rock, pop and experimental, he decorates his musical artworks with an indelible style.
“The Unraveled,” featuring singer/songwriter Rebecca Loebe, opens with a thrumming synth, tonally deep strings and a solid syncopated groove, followed by Loebe’s inimitable voice. The melody emanates electronic, pop and R&B flavors, producing an infectious flowing melody that radiates portentous significance. A sparkling synth juxtaposes the looming tones of the guitar, providing a sonic contrast of light against dark that establishes a foreboding tension. Pale layers of diaphanous background vocals exude a luminous wave of ethereality hanging overhead like mist.
Loebe’s voice is breathtakingly beautiful, delightful and superb, financing a sense of surreal aural melancholy across the music, as her dulcet voice presents an image lying between a rift and a revelation. Its rich timbre discharges lenses of quince-colored light shot through with a myriad of scintillating points of luminescence that form and vanish, like a bluish glow fading to indigo.
The lyrics of “The Unraveled” relate the unraveling of a relationship, oozing the full-spectrum dominance of a burgeoning array of problems that demand decisions, decisions that feel like gravity because there’s no cessation, no respite, and no apparent solution.
The video, directed by Patrick Mason, was shot in a starkly beautiful yet washed-out town in West Virginia, where a husband and wife find themselves imprisoned in a relationship that is slowly, inexorably unraveling. Each lives alone, isolated in a murky cell of problems: unmet expectations, mushrooming debt and the unrelenting responsibilities of parenthood. The wife, emotionally and physically exhausted, peeks through the blinds as her husband leaves for work. Once he is gone, she can breathe. She lies on the lawn, smoking a cigarette, gazing at the sky; then listens to music, as she futilely tries to escape the walls closing in. At work, her husband labors until ready to drop, and then visits the local bar rather than go home. Finding a gun in a drawer, the wife contemplates a horrible final solution. Then she goes to the bathroom, gazes at her reflection in the mirror and reaches for a bottle of pills. At that point, her child wanders up the stairs and hugs her.
The video is moving, poignant and intimately personal, demonstrating that people aren’t mere statistics; they are emotional beings dependent on others.
“The Unraveled” has it going on! The haunting melody, rife with the emergent synth and dark guitar, along with Loebe’s spectacular voice and the lingering background vocals provide an allurement that is irresistible. I await the album with great anticipation, and I have already downloaded the title track. It’s so very, very good.
Find out more about ash.ØK here.