New Local Music: A Beautiful, Sordid Romance from Elk and Boar

Stumbled across this new music video from Tacoma folk/soul band, Elk and Boar, the music project of Kirsten Wenlock (aka Elk) and Travis Barker (aka Boar). You may remember them from this year’s Doe Bay Festival. 

The stop-motion style “Thief” conjures a wonderful effect similar to silent films. Be patient: it grows on you.

Also the styling is pretty fabulous. Sort of like those old west photo booths I used to long to pose in at Six Flags theme parks – except less cheesy.

I wrote to the band and asked them to tell me about the story behind the video and its creators. They kindly obliged.

From the desk of Kirsten Wenlock (Elk):

This somber song is about an affair, great remorse and ultimately baptism, or death of an old self. The video leaves room for interpretation but what we hope viewers see is a man and a woman in a corrosive relationship, their desires instigating misery.

My friend Sarah Smith has a beautiful online boutique called Deeds and Petunia. She up-cycles vintage wears and makes gorgeous hair decor and has a gift for setting a magical scene.

Sarah wanted to do something she hadn’t done before and asked about collaborating with us on a video for “thief”. She created a storyboard and took us in a neo-Victorian direction and truly outdid herself. She and Dee Jones (Open Door Photography) made beautiful clothes for us to wear and collected materials for the shoot and we turned my living room into an ‘old-timey’ parlor. We shot it all at my house, in a day. We had so much fun drinking cordial and whiskey and playing out a sordid romance.

Dee Jones is a brilliant friend who has done all our band photos to date. We worked with her on our last video “Room to Start” which is also stop motion. Stop motion is a lot of work but I really like the challenge of taking a thousand pictures and lining them up with lyrics and melodic lines so they support a song and a story. You have a lot of power to manipulate a plot.

We were trying to decide how to end this video. I had a silly idea about a gorilla stealing my dog while I was sleeping (we happened to have a gorilla suit laying around). My friend Julie Rex took the pictures of me play-sleeping on my iPhone.

Learn more about this local band’s music on their website.