Pitchfork

Gregor Samsa awoke after a night of unsettling dreams to discover "Jeroen Van Aken", from latest album Rest, had been turned into something nearly half the length of the eight-minute-plus LP version, and its glacially paced arrangement set to this watery video. With even a leading presidential candidate from the party of Al Gore proposing tax cuts likely to encourage global warming, guess everybody knew where those glaciers were headed, right? "It seems the devil's got a grip on me," frontman Champ Bennett intones, accompanied by Nikki King's vocal that wobbles as if coming up from underwater (or "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl"). The song's central, stately piano is shown in loving detail in the video, along with other pieces of the orchestration. But we also see a cardboard box floating in shimmering water, a bit of crumpled paper-- plastic?-- billowing in the wind, and the pipes of a radiator in some empty apartment. The devil damns the narrator of "Jeroen Van Aken" no matter what he or she does, but this video offers a concise introduction to the song's slow-building tranquility, the hellfire better left to Jerry Lee Lewis or his cousin Jimmy Swaggart. I mean, if we're talking about preachers now.