Watch, Ben Woods’s impeccable short film; Dispeller – which premiered via The FADER, earlier this week. The film features live performances of three tracks from the forthcoming record Dispeller out this Friday, July 15.
Directed by filmmaker Martin Sagadin (Aldous Harding, Tiny Ruins, Marlon Williams), Dispeller, the film features Woods and a shifting cast of artists from Aotearoa performing takes from the record at The Sitting Room, the portside shack where the record was made with Ben Edwards. Woods’ homemade demos and chopped footage navigating his hometown Ōtautahi Christchurch are stirred through these performances.
Woods notes, “Part of making this record for me was experimenting with and understanding space. With recording, it was the studio versus where I felt the songs wanted to transport the listener. And through writing, it looked at the natural projection of where I was geographically and the people I was making music with or whose music I loved. Making this short with Martin— who’s directed most of my videos and knows me inside out— was how I wanted to share that less abstractly. Piecing the songs with my friends in the spaces where I made the album. Not to paint a portrait of myself, but of all those external forces that built me.”
On the first performance in the film, Dispeller’s closing track ‘White Leather Again’, Woods and his band offer a poised thought on riding the tides of our neurosis. “I’ve got a prison made of porcelain embedded with gold/ and drenched in all that’s mighty/ and dressed in all our symmetry/ and pressed so hard for a change we’ll walk away, but then we’ll go” he and Lucy Hunter (Opposite Sex) chime together. Woods’ warbling guitar with IRD Rory Dalley’s backbeat drumming anchors the song, making way for the synthesiser and organs that whirl overhead.
Luke Towart of Wurld Series cameos, pushing the outer limits of a tape machine in a simmered and sax-laden version of ‘Hovering at Home‘. Right before a late and weary-eyed take on ‘Fame’, Dispeller’s opener, with Ryan Fisherman crooning through a phone.
The FADER on ‘Dispeller’ short film:
“Aside from a mic’d up tape machine that delivers some delicious static on Dispeller‘s lead single, “Hovering At Home”, the band plays conventional rock instruments, with Woods shifting between rhythmic electric strumming and inspired acoustic fingerpicking. “Hovering” sits sandwiched between two new tracks, “White Leather Again” and “Fame,” the first of which is a slow-burning sketch of a call and response that sounds somehow both ethereal and anthemic while the video’s finale is a warped, drifting vocal duet set to a single shimmering synth. Interspersed between these songs are eerie instrumental interludes that play behind blurry B-roll of Woods’ wanderings, making the whole affair feel like a long, lovely dream.”
– The FADER
Watch, Dispeller, short film
With special Thanks to Creative New Zealand
Dispeller album out this Friday, July 15 on Vinyl, CD, and digitally via
SHRIMPER (USA) / MELTED ICE CREAM (NZ) / MERITORIO (EU/UK)
Presave Dispeller / Preorder
Tickets For Ben Woods’ Dispeller September Tour
On Sale Now From Banished Music
