You can always expect to be amazed by an alt-J music video, but the English indie rock trio have truly outdone themselves with the recently released music video for "Pleader" - the final song from their third studio album RELAXER (June 2017). In the past, the band has excelled at presenting cinematic vignettes that poignantly evoke Eros and Thanatos in equal measure, e.g. "Breezeblocks" (domestic violence), "In Cold Blood" (a foraging mouse scurries onto the bloodbath left behind by a murderous couple), and "3WW" (a Mexican funeral procession takes a surreal and tragic turn when the male half of a young couple is killed).
The six-minute epic video for "Pleader" takes their cinematography to greater heights, thanks to eminent music video director Isaiah Seret (who was also responsible for the music videos for Cults' "Go Outside" and MGMT's "Cool Song No. 2", and who has now diversified into cinematic and deftly-scored commercial work). The song sees alt-J at their most literary; the refrain 'How green, how green was my valley?' was directly inspired by Richard Llewelyn's 1939 novel How Green Was My Valley. The novel's narrator, Huw Morgan, leaves his 19th-century Welsh mining town - and its splendid pastures - in search of a better life. With the help of a boys choir and an organ (and a church's acoustic imprint, thanks to the Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire), the band succeed in conveying the song's hymnal quality effectively - this is pastoral spiritualism reimagined for contemporary and secular listeners: 'Call to arms these harmonies!/ And in happy agony we sing/ How green, how green was my valley?'
An alt-J narrative would nevertheless be incomplete without the elements of death, destruction, and redemption. The song's symphonic instrumentals (via the London Metropolitan Orchestra) evoke an unspoken tension and drama, which allude to the novel's many tragedies (Morgan eventually has to desert his town, after losing his father and elder brother to mining accidents). Seret expertly weaved his own personal inspiration into the band's memo ('A Welsh mining love story; A tidal wave of earth') by drawing from the plot of Swedish film director Andrei Tarkovsky's final film The Sacrifice (1986). This is just as well, since the plot and characters of Llewelyn's popular novel have engendered a mixed reception in more recent times. Despite the husband's infertility, a young married couple insists on having a child (with the help of a neighbor) despite the knowledge that this will spell doom for their community. Their rural community eventually pays for this decision with their lives, but their son lives on as an orphan - returning gloriously to his birthplace years later, after its verdant splendor has been restored.
