Multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Alain Johannes releases a psychedelic video for his recent release “If Morning Comes” from the album Hum released on California-based Ipecac Recordings. Johanne’s wife Natasha Shneider died in 2008, and his creative partner and friend Chris Cornell died in 2017. After this Johannes’s “mind was sent to a low, reflective place, that was only piqued by a debilitating illness in 2019. He wasn’t sure he would recover,” says the singer’s recent press release.
Johannes states, “’If Morning Comes’ was one of the most cathartic for me during the making of Hum. Many difficult nights while I was ill, those words were like my mantra.”
According to the press release, the album “was written during a period of illness and mourning that found Johannes taking stock of his existence, and his future. ‘If Morning Comes’ was a majorly important song for the record and Johannes personally and the equally vivid and graphic-leaning music video envisioned by Liam Lynch,” the video’s director.
The video begins with a distorted TV signal. Johannes’s head appears with closed eyes in the middle of the screen without a body. The background changes to a cemetery during an evening lightning storm. His head starts to get smaller and the background turns to a dawn sky above the clouds along with red and yellow rose petals floating through the air, but that background lasts only for a moment. The stormy evening cemetery scenery returns and then the backgrounds continue to switch back and forth between these two settings.
The dark and light backgrounds morph into two new backgrounds. The dark background becomes a piece of land containing a bunch of dead tree trunks getting pulled out of the ground by the evening storm which now includes tornadoes ripping out tree trunks. The light background now shows the dead tree trunks flying in the air.
Johannes’s head starts to multiply with his eyes now open looking in different directions in the middle of the screen as the background turns into outer space with the dead tree trunks continuing to flow through space. His eyes close again and there are two new light and dark backgrounds. The light background appears to be a sunrise over the water. The dark background appears to be a destroyed city with burning buildings and cars. The scenes toggle back and forth again.
The dark scene turns into the silhouette of a crow in a tree. Ashes from the fire appear to be flowing in the air. The light background turns into a field. His eyes open, his head starts to multiply again with outer space reappearing in the background. His multiple heads go away and his one head is now in a spider web with birds flying in the background and a spider crawling towards his head. His eyes close and psychedelic backgrounds start switching from scene-to-scene. The spider stays on the screen throughout all of these background changes.
Some of the same backgrounds reappear such as the cemetery and birds flying through the air. His head becomes attached to a dead tree trunk and starts walking through the woods. The video returns to the distorted TV signal similar to the start of the video and the video ends.
The song complements the video as the song seems sad, dreamy and somewhat trance inducing. It has a repetitive dry percussion with distorted vocals and guitars.
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