Premiere: Leland & the Silver Wells touches on trauma in new video, ‘Give Up the Gun’

Carroll Baker’s turn as Mary Ann Robinson in 1961’s Something Wild, a feature directed by Jack Garfein (The Strange One, The Journey Back), is startling in its handling of rape and recovery. A college student, Mary Ann is sexually assaulted on her way home from a social gathering, and the aftereffects send her into a deep, dark and troubled hellscape. She clings to an existence that seems to slip further from her grasp, and her overly critical mother is of little comfort. Mining the film’s aesthetics, both its grit and charm, alternative singer, songwriter and musician Leland & the Silver Wells (the professional moniker of Leland Ettinger) applies such tragic mood and atmosphere to a brand new music video for “Give Up the Gun,” premiering today – and its innately noir-edge is re-fueled for a masterful and poetically devastating art-piece.

“Floating in the deep dark water / Drowned baby doll and daughter / Erased from life not a trace,” the words puff around her as charcoal pencil on tracing paper. Ettinger’s vocals entice you, siren-like, into a magnetic world of true catastrophe of the human mind. The visual, directed by Larissa Jaks and styled by Carly O’Hurn, selects various design touchpoints and story beats, especially in “how this trauma plays out in her mind, emotions, and body against a stark urban portrait of 1960s Manhattan,” writes Ettinger to B-Sides & Badlands over email.

Languid musicality dangles across nightmarish psychedelia, the images softened and obscured to mimic maddening emotional descent. Brandi Shea stars in the video and upgrades the song’s unbearable impact even more through tight-knit, emotionally-depleting moments. “The city in all its grittiness and ruthlessness and alienation becomes the landscape and projection of her traumatized consciousness. Her innocence is shattered, and she is on the run in unbearable scenes of heat and claustrophobia in subway cars, dingy austere apartments and city streets,” continues Ettinger, whose vision cracks open an astonishing sequence. “I found the visual and emotional touchstones of this film to be a perfect guide to the lyrics and music. Jaks’ treatment of the video supports the epic emotional and sonic journey of the song in the subdued and faded hues of a dark memory.”

“Cut to a cold and dark apartment / Playing the backdrop of an argument / The blame is the name of the game,” yearning for truth, enlightenment and peace feather outward, blurring the mental lines and casting the viewer further into the fiery abyss. Ettinger embraces the role as objective narrator to great effect, offering honesty in its purest form. She goes on: “Replay the story in the daylight / Giving up the hunger to win the fight / Awake from a nightmare in pain…”

“Give Up the Gun” is lifted from Leland & the Silver Wells’ 2018 self-titled studio set, her first record in 11 years.

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