Video Review - It's Alright

It's Alright

by Fractures

EP: Fractures (available now)

 

There are clips made for music and there are songs made for visuals and there are clips made purely to sell records and records made to sell clips, but every now and then, there are pieces of art. Visuals matched with sounds that move you in a way that only the greatest of creatives do. While telling one story, they manage to speak of so many more and all the while remain true to their craft. It's a skill easily lost, so when it works, it's something to be praised.

We've all been there, we've all visited this place. It's hard and it's somehow uplifting but it's horrible and it's life affirming and it hurts like hell but it's something we all do once in a while, it's somewhere we all find ourselves every now and then. That giant empty room, the broken windows and life strewn all over the floor, a staircase to nowhere and a space full of everyone and no one all at once. These are the places we fear and the places we desperately discover when we've hit a wall, when our hearts can take no more and these places, they are common to us all.

While the clip for 'It's Alright' by Fractures is actually the story of a man returning to his now abandoned hometown in the Ukraine, it's the combination of sights and slow keys, the gentle rolling beats accompanying Mark Zito's vocal "don't get dragged through, don't be consumed...it's alright, it's alright" that grab your heart and pull the tears from your eyes. While we all haven't faced the exact horror that the heartbroken man in the clip has faced; having been forced to leave his hometown and returning so many years later to so many memories and so much nothing; the thing that makes this clip and this song such an experience is that we relate. We all have that same basic fear of loneliness, the need for compassion and the dread of the loss of love, no matter how big or small, whether it be one person, one place or an entire life. They are the basics that make us human and they're all represented in the images of director and cinematographer, Matthew Chuang and the sounds of Fractures.

There are clips made for music and there are songs made for visuals...and then there are minutes that you will see on some tiny screen somewhere that won't let you go. They will make their way around your mind, they will wrap themselves around your heart and they will haunt your moments. Those are the clips and these are the sounds that I love the most.

Jo Michelmore gives 'It's Alright' five Thom Yorke heads out of five...