Able Baker Fox Mark Their Return With 'Drift'

The music video for 'Drift' combines eerie, black and white death-defying stunt footage with a sound bed of emotional alt-rock hooks.

The music video for 'Drift' combines eerie, black and white death-defying stunt footage with a sound bed of emotional alt-rock hooks. You know, just in case you were wondering.

One of the key rock/alternative acts from Arctic Rodeo Recordings is Able Baker Fox, who was/is made up of members from Small Brown Bike, The Casket Lottery, and Coalesce, and are more usually well-known for their 2008 full-length record, 'Voices'. However, you may never have heard of this band until now (I certainly hadn't either), as Able Baker Fox never hit the same level as your Thursday's or your American Football's. Shit, they didn't even reach the level of bands like From Autumn To Ashes or Taken.

But that's not really what this band is about and in the here and now of 2017, Able Baker Fox have reformed from the ashes to return with a brand new album - 'Visions'. Recorded in just four days at The Magpie Cage Recording Studio in Baltimore, MD during January of this year, the new LP from brothers Mike and Ben Reed and fellow members Nathan Ellis and Jeff Gensterblum recently saw it's debut single enter the world; the exceptional 'Drift'.

With instrumentation, melancholic timbres and melodic conventions strongly evoking 90's and 2000's Midwest American emo and rock bands that made popular the lamentation of youthful suburban blues, this new track from the U.S. four-piece is a highly captivating one. It harkens back to a sound and tone of a now bygone scene - an underground era before platforms like Facebook and Spotify, the times and places that Washed Up Emo deeply romanticises from week to week. Yet Able Baker Fox's music thankfully doesn't feel nostalgic for sheer nostalgia's sake; it comes off as purely genuine and natural than anything else.

Besides, 'Drift' contains one of my most favourite choruses of 2017 thus far, and that's got to count for something, right?

Anyway, another aspect that really aids the depressive but dreamy quality of 'Drift' is it's accompanying visuals; showing early to mid 20th-century stuntmen acting out death-defying stunts both on-ground and high in the air. The black and white colour palette reinforces the song's mid-tempo pace and overall dreary mood, whereas the fitting 'make-or-break' moments the lyrics detail throughout bolsters the tracks' ear-worming vocal melodies. Forever proving that any band can create a winning product by taking archival (and most likely public domain) footage from decades gone by, apply some basic editing, drop their killer new tune over it, and boom - a solid product is well ready to publish and share!

Hell, even though the last half of this clip is just the first half's footage reversed - and while that is in some way lazy - it still makes for a very cool effect; creating some very unnatural but nonetheless visually interesting scenes to watch as the sonics of 'Drift' envelop your ears.

Now, would this song have had the exact same touching impact on me without these visuals? No, and I think that 'Drift' would be worse off without such shared art to accompany. While not of the same genre, this worked superbly for Architects with their 'These Colours Don't Run' clip, and it works wonders here for Able Baker Fox and 'Drift'.