Charlie Looker busily collaborates to myriad projects that flirt with abrasive, experimental, and/or extreme sounds around the city, but it’s BTW Extra Life that allows him space to fully express his singular blend of dexterous, classically inclined modal melodies, dense and winding composition, and a dark hued, metallic heaviness that hammers hard despite the band’s tendency to steer clear of guitar distortion. And the shit jams live, where Charlie coaxes a sort of controlled violence from his precise guitar playing and adenoidal vocals. In the waaaaay creepy Peaking Team-directed video for “Head Shrinker” he plays the title role, but instead of controlled violence from a guitar he’s coaxing from his psychotherapy patient discharge that’s both emotional and surreal. (Surreal = pulling gold coins from a gash in his belly.) I guess the video’s shifting between stark black & white and a fantasy masked sax player, or depiction of Charlie as a fastidious doctor with a quiet menace, sort of touches on that control/violence dichotomy in Extra Life’s music. But mostly it’s just super unsettling and probably the perfect look for Extra Life. Watch it:
