There’s nothing more satisfying than hearing a band really succeed at stretching outside their comfort zone. That’s one of the many reasons Artist Home is elated to premiere “Uneasy,” the new video by Golden Idols. It’s the title track on a five-song EP that illustrates successful sonic boundary-pushing.
The Seattle-based quartet’s prior output has been a hook-filled alloy of surf music, garage rock, and shoegazer atmospherics. Those elements still come into play on Uneasy, but the band’s added a strong thread of soul and funk to the mix.
“Uneasy,” the track, begins with a steady, percolating groove built on lead singer Patrick Broz’s slashing, funky rhythm guitar and the tight rhythm section of drummer Saba Samakar and bassist Jewel Loree. Lead guitarist Eric Peterson lays down some warm retro keyboards and just a bit of guitar feedback for texture. It’s utterly distinctive from Golden Idols’ back catalog, yet still sounds distinctively Golden Idols.
One reassuring mainstay in the Golden Idols universe remians the sometimes laugh-out-loud shittiness of romance. Broz’s lyrics and wonderfully deadpan vocal delivery explore the frustration inherent in those conflicts that seem to flare up out of nowhere between lovers—specifically the dust-ups where no one seems to really know what started things in the first place (“I say I’m sorry and I don’t know why/It’s hard to mean it when you don’t know what it’s for”).
Director/editor Hunter Boen does a bang-up job of pinning the band’s disparate charisma, with Broz displaying great, laid back comic visual timing while he attempts to make heads or tails from his non-communicative significant other.
Meanwhile, the rest of the band jams in a tiny room. Samakar’s wearing what looks like a lizard-costume onesie. Loree sits plucking her bass in a kimono, bedroom slippers, and white face paint. And Peterson looks tired and dinks around with a tiny Casio.
With Broz fronting them, it’s like someone venting in song, backed by the three weird guests who never quite got the hint to leave when the party ended. “Uneasy,” the video, sees Boen and the band managing a spot-on visual representation of the song’s paradoxical charm. In the Golden Idols Universe, buoyant pop hooks back a wearily wry sense of humor where nothing can be taken at face value.
