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Music

Watch Mercury Rev's Woozy New Video for "Coming up for Air"

Heartbreak, dolphins, and a song that sounds like a hug.

Honestly this sounds like Christmas: warm, fuzzy, and comforting, with the faint whiff of cinammon to boot. The Buffalo, New York-native's new song "Coming up for Air" allows Jonathan Donahue's airy vocals to recline on a bed of strings and choral echoes: he makes the wake of a relationship split sound like a soaring, optimistic journey of rebirth, even as his heart lies in tatters on the floor. And then there's that line "Dolphin / Just another dolphin / Like all the other dolphins"—you can't help but smile at the thought of the Mercury Rev frontman reincarnated as a dolphin, although, duh, that's not what's actually happening here. Lifted from their ninth album, The Light In You (via Bella Union), the video, premiering above, is a rainbow-colored kaleidoscopic trip. Directed by Jonathan Caouette, this short is actually part of a bigger of a bigger project of his, yet to be revealed, but he have this to say about the piece:

"The video as a whole is inspired by one part, my love for this made for TV movie from the 1970s called The Bermuda Depths and one part Sigmund Freud's existential requiem, "On Transience". I feel like the end result is on par to something kind of cool and ambiguous and hallucinatory-like."

Dive in.