New Music Of The Day: Jerkcurb – Somerton Beach (Video)

Jacob Read aka Jerkcurb’s new video for ‘Somerton Beach’ really brings the track to life. Ironic, seeing as its main character has seemingly given up on everything around him. A sad song, it’s empty lament is counterbalanced by endless swampy greens and purples that flood the video’s animation – made entirely by Jacob.

He’s part of the same scene as King Krule, having played in bands with Archy Marshall and his brother Jack as far back as 2009 (“dik ooz is / was / will be / will never be jacob read, jack marshall, archy marshall, ed bernez, ogul-can genc” reads one such Bandcamp profile). And like the artist formerly known as Zoo Kid, Jacob’s a don at making tight-lipped, atmospheric and uniquely British-sounding melancholy come to life on record. No slang or slouching here: every chord change, every metaphor and every syllable sung is poised and considered.

If you wanna get lost in his world even more, you could do worse than read this Topsafe interview with him and Jack. Here’s a quick excerpt from it, with Jacob talking about the inspiration, both song and video, for ‘Somerton Beach’:

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“I’ve always been interested in Noir-y, detective-y kind of shit. We kind of had some of that with Dik Ooz songs like ‘Vacation Blooz’ and ‘Weeping’. Also, ‘Stalking’ had this narration over the top and had this kind of synth jam playing throughout. ‘Somerton Beach’ is named after this unsolved mystery where a guy was found washed up on a beach in 1948. I didn’t want to animate a beach, that’s long, so the film’s more of a metaphor. It’s set around the same time but it’s about a guy who is washed up literally. His career is behind him, he’s staring at this record of him when he was young, and he wants to go back to that place when he was famous, which is in the lyrics too, this dialogue between himself now and his old self. I wanted to have two separate realities where one’s this bleak reality and the other is this kind of contorted memory of show business.”

Here’s the video:

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