PREMIERE: Julian Calendar Play ‘Dumb but Smart’ Punk in Explosive ‘Black Moon’ Video

Jeremy Fisher’s rubbery, sinister bass kicks off the break-neck video for Julian Calendar’s latest single “Black Moon,” which premieres below. 

Soon that snaking bass runs straight into a razor wire barricade of clangorous funk-punk guitars, while the video dives into a morass of black and white archival film footage, as Air Force service women raise a wobbly weather balloon and Soviet Union-era Russians cheer nuclear missiles rolling by in a May Day parade. (Any resemblance to Donald Trump’s squalid birthday military parade is painfully obvious probably purely unintentional.)

The problem with balloons is that they often deflate, while missiles and rockets tend to explode — sometimes prematurely. That point is driven home by Jeff Jackson’s and Hannah Hundley’s, teasing, interchanging B-52’s-meets-Iggy Pop vocals:    

“Got a dead rock in my pocket/ Need a live wire in the socket/ Miss my, miss-a my Luna/ I keep a coming, coming too soon-a…”

Julian Calendar is primarily known for brainy experimental music about political topics, but band co-founder Jackson cheerfully confirms that the band’s latest single “Black Moon” is unabashedly about substandard male performance in the bedroom.

“Jeremy had this great garage-rock riff and I was looking for some lyrics for it,” Jackson tells Queen City Nerve. “I was thinking that there are so many macho garage-rock songs but not many about premature ejaculation.”

In the song/video, Huntley laments the situation with ululating cries that summon ’70s punk stalwarts like Los Angeles’ X. meanwhile cartoon bunnies blush, a tear runs down a woman’s cheek, a rambunctious punk band plays onstage with their faces covered by superimposed pink circles, and rockets explode on the launch pad. 

The latter image is accentuated with an almost subliminal headline about yet another SpaceX Starship blowing up  in the atmosphere like a multi-billion dollar plaything. (Perhaps Elon Musk, like his spurned ex Trump, can trace his moral and personality shortcomings to failure to “lift off?”) 

Although “Black Moon” takes its title from a 1975 arthouse fantasy-horror film directed by Louis Malle, the song is minimally political and gloriously dumb.

“Occasionally we like to write songs that are stupid in a smart way …  tapping into that wonderful tradition of the Ramones,” Jackson notes.  “[Their songs] are so dumb that they’re genius.”

As the rambunctious tune attains the fractured fluidity of post-punk veterans Gang of Four, the video’s director and editor Robin Doermann bombards the viewer with pop art “Zap!” graphics, creepy crew-cutted white dudes braying with laughter and two-dimensional animations of the moon — all swirling like detritus stirred up in a trash fire.

With Jackson’s strangled cry of, “Switch it off!” the tune goes apeshit with a squall of distorted guitar noise amid starbursts of feedback.

The tumultuous breakout works so well, Jackson says, because the song’s producer John Agnello is a master of marshaling noise in the service of unexpectedly irresistible hooks. 

Agnello’s impressive production portfolio includes work with major art-noise maestros like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr., as well as mainstream pop mainstays like Bruce Springsteen, Kurt Vile and Bob Dylan.

The song swiftly emerges from the burst of cacophony, barely slowing its maelstrom of ratcheting guitars and ricocheting vocals. While the band mostly eschews politics in “Black Moon,” director Doermann, who is also an esteemed local musician (Patois Counselors, Calabi Yau), manages to sneak disturbing imagery into Julian Calendar’s rollicking ode to erectile dysfunction.

A shot of a snake slithering up a young woman’s skirt seems exploitative or random at first, but pays off unexpectedly. The young woman is later an inscrutable witness as a group of women in fatigues are rounded up and executed by armed men. The uniformed men could be Nazis, MAGA or ICE; take your pick. (Does the song and scene imply that MAGA and manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate are raging and violent misogynistic pricks because they’re firing blanks?)

Meanwhile, Julian Calendar manages to conflate the Ramones with Cole Porter when Jackson and Hundley shout out like a football cheer: “No more! No more!/ Moon-a in-a June-a!”

Porter, a prominent 20th-century songwriter, decried using a “moon and June” in lyrics because he considered that rhyming scheme the last refuge of the lazy lyricist, Jackson explains.

To drive that point home, the song and video concludes with a romantic clinch and kiss from a vintage Hollywood film. Which film is hard to say, because the lovers’ faces, like those of the punk band we saw earlier, are obscured by the same nauseating Pepto-Bismal pink circles.

The faces of Julian Calendar’s bandmembers will fortunately not be covered when the band performs its new, more punked-up material. Vocalists Jackson and Hundley will be joined by Fisher (bass, guitars, drum programming), Scott Thompson (bass, guitar, keyboards, drum programming) and Sean Robinson (guitars, keyboards, synths) at Petra’s on Sept. 27, one day after Speaking a Dead Language, the band’s new album containing “Black Moon,” drops.

Read more: Experimental Rockers Julian Calendar Schedule New Music (2019)

In the meantime, Jackson hopes the video for “Black Moon” offers a great adrenaline rush, giving listeners a sense of fun and exuberance amid joyful noise.

“It’s this exciting dumb rock ‘n’ roll song that makes you want to keep revisiting it, [while] realizing that there are actually a number of layers there [that] are undercutting a lot of received ideas about rock,” Jackson says.