Nearly a year after its release, Phantogram’s Three (2016) offers viewers with a final music video to accompany its dark, brooding and grief-stricken atmospherics. It is only apt that “Funeral Pyre” - the album opener - resurfaces at a belated point, since it is the most elegiac cut in an album wrought by mourning (the album title partly refers to the band’s triple loss: the suicide of Sarah Barthel’s sister, as well as the deaths of Prince and David Bowie).
Directed by Gianluca Minucci, the music video features hyper realistic and surreal scenes from Los Angeles (the New Yorkers’ new home), from the view out of a car window. There are some conventional images of Americana: cheerleaders, surfers, an aspiring starlet, a lively businessman, cops with donuts, two cherubic blonde twins on a manicured suburban lawn; a birthday celebration in a sunny park.
These are interspersed with scenes from a more left-field vision of diversity: a happy interracial family, an aged gay couple kissing with dogs in tow, Asian bodybuilders serving as topless maids, a drag queen, plus sized boob flashers, graffiti inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, a Mariachi band in front of a Mexican restaurant, Chinatown, Koreatown, smoking nuns, a South Asian celebration.
Barthel makes good use for her volume and range, alternating between soaring vocals and morbid whispers to score this eclectic scenery. She stretches out the song’s sparse lyrics to carve out a narrative of death, catharsis, and redemption: ‘My funeral pyre/ My ship of fire/ As it sinks, I rise/ All I see/ Is your eyes/ Your eyes/ Your eyes/ Light in the sky/ In the sky.
Where there is light, there must also be darkness. The song’s stark backbeats and brooding synths echo the grittiness of the starker scenes that Minucci’s camera seems to gravitate towards: tents for the homeless, dilapidated buildings, a possible rape scene, theft, vandalism, assault, firemen in action, a middle-aged dominatrix flogging an aged male submissive, two young drug-users in the streets.
A picturesque vision of the city burning under a bright sky ends the video, completing Minucci’s phantasmagoric vision of “a phantom drive in a land of nowhere, where love meets grief, loneliness, violence and desperation". The fiery image echoes the album's cover, offering the viewer with "a tragic, Pynchonian elegy, of a world destined to a destroying, but perhaps purifying, fire. A descent to hell, the swan song of a city that celebrates its funeral pyre.”
