Couch Jackets sounds like an alligator’s eating us,” reads the explanatory note on the Little Rock, Arkansas quartet’s Bandcamp page. Fans of the band have become accustomed to this sort of irreverence – these are funny guys, and they lead with their personalities. Yet it’s not just a joke. Listening to Couch Jackets can be like entering a whirlpool: songs don’t behave the way you expect them to. They come at the listener with manic energy; they twist and turn, shiver and shake, and no matter how playful they seem, they always carry with them a whiff of danger.
Given their ambition and the idiosyncratic nature of the music they make, it’s fair to call them a progressive rock act. Their emphasis on texture and love of experimentation aligns them with the neo-psychedelic movement, and their supple grooves are redolent of classic ‘70s pop. There’s even a hint of country music somewhere in the mix. Go To Bed, the group’s most recent set, was made in Nashville, and it’s the fullest realization of their visionary sound yet committed to record. It somehow manages to sound more polished than their prior recordings while preserving the primal chaos and sense of fun that has always distinguished the band.
Just as the band has developed a singular sound, they’ve come up with a visual aesthetic that’s wholly theirs – and that matches the music perfectly. For a still-new band, Couch Jackets have made a lot of videos, and they all display the group’s inventiveness, imagination, and sense of humor.
Glide is proud to premiere the video for “Don’t Think Just Breathe”, which manages to satirize obsessive news-watchers, cooking shows, reality television, and the act of eating dinner. Couch Jackets deliver an earful of indie rock openheartedness along with heady musical workouts that remind listeners of Flaming Lips meets Wolf Parade.
“A huge part of our philosophy as a project is to find creative ways to warp our resources; we want to take what we have and imaginatively stretch it to express our vision uniquely, and ultimately reinvent what we’re saying in a new light,” says guitarist/vocalist Brennan Leeds. “The “Don’t Think Just Breathe” video started out simply, mostly as some goofy footage of us eating some really gross foods, so we spent a lot of time ruminating on how we could re-contextualize that footage and have it make a statement that parallels the song’s musings. The result took a crazy amount of time to edit, but attempting to fulfill the repurposing of it all and give it new meaning was such a fun challenge.”
