Week in Pop: Donovan Blanc, False Priest, Old Smile, Pie Face Girls

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False Priest

Introducing Oakland's False Priest; press photo courtesy of the artists.
Introducing Oakland’s False Priest; press photo courtesy of Ashley Heist.

Oakland’s own False Priest present the world premiere for “Let Me Be Your Mother”, the first single from their first album, Driving In Circles, available later this year. Presenting an exclusive look at their video directed by Sarah Maloney, the Oakland exhibits facets of their sound & aesthetic via the feel of home movies & art house ventures alike.
“Let Me Be Your Mother” from False Priest is like looking through the proofs from home movies taken of you, your bros, fam & more that feature a holiday’s worth of shenanigans. Those holiday feelings are exhibited here with all those aforementioned aesthetic pretensions & a whole lot more where backyard antics & travelogues traverse together in a blend of joy & over-ecstatic bliss. With some video visuals that resemble alternate takes of the Nirvana Nevermind cover, False Priest utilize their clerical pulpit as a way to preach the gospel of a whole other sorta breed of intellectual rec-room-pop that the world should take notice of immediately.

False Priest shared the following insights with us about the making of the song “Let Me Be Your Mother”:

“Let Me Be Your Mother” is a song about realizing how easy it is for people to get hurt or wind up dead. It feels funny to me because when I wrote this song around six years ago, in my first semester of college, and I didn’t really have a very strong grip on just how wild life can be when you’re an autonomous person. Honestly, most of the people I knew weren’t really living exceptionally unhealthy lifestyles, but I guess I got overwhelmed by the potential for danger that could go down. I always felt like the song was a little overbearing in a funny-but-sensitive way.
Most of my songs take a couple years to write, but for the most part this one is mostly unchanged from the original draft. The biggest changes came from a version of the song that our friend Daniel Bromfield made, which is way more streamlined than the original, and it has this beautiful keyboard solo in the middle. I liked his version so much that we started playing it the way he did it.
It should also be said that we recorded this song, and the album that it’s going to be on, at Donut Time Audio in Oakland, home of the band Everyone Is Dirty. If you live in the Bay Area and you want to make a great-sounding rock album, DTA is where it’s at.

False Priest also shared further reflections about the creation of the Sarah Maloney video:

As for the video: It was directed by Sarah Maloney, who I met around the same time I wrote this song. Her style has always been really cool and messy and modern feeling to me, and we’ve been wanting to work together forever. We filmed the video at the house where I grew up, in Fairfax, California. We got our friend Nick to volunteer to be thrown into the pool, although I don’t think he realized exactly how cold it was going to be in there. Shouts out to Nick for being a brave and strong boy.
Our keyboardist, Kabir (who is not present on this recording but will be in future ones[you don’t need to include that bit in the actual article if you don’t want]) has this to say about the song:
Something about this song that has always resonated with me is that it’s about the torturous feeling that you are personally responsible for the people you love, while knowing that you can’t ever control them. And It also seems like it’s about a dude requesting consent just to try to take care of someone (not taking for granted that they need help necessarily).