Brooklyn synth-pop duo Scam Avenue’s video for new single “Fault Lines” is, like the song itself, quietly commanding. The band’s lead singer, Devery Doleman, wanders in front of the camera, half-interested but clearly perturbed. It’s cut together, four or five portraits in line at a time, colored in neon pinks and earthy greens. It’s not there to grab the viewer so much as it is to gently disturb them. The spare, new wave synths and electric percussion that play over the video don’t interfere with Doleman’s breathy falsetto, which doesn’t clash with the neon on-screen—but it all works collectively as a sensory jolt.The video, which we're premiering at the top of the page, was shot entirely on an iPhone 7 in one afternoon by director Tyler Hubby (Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present). “I cried watching the rough cut for the first time,” Doleman wrote in an email to Noisey. “It was as if Tyler had read my mind[…] ‘Fault Lines’ is a song about obsession: the compulsion to return to a lost moment, how trauma prevents connection while we compulsively recreate patterns out of longing to connect, and yet once people have hurt each other too many times, there is no going back. Tyler intuited this—you can see a woman both fractured and fluid, alternately pleading with and spurning the camera, with Caity as some kind of subconscious doppelgänger whose motions are fluid and graceful whereas mine were choreographed to be at times staccato or almost 'possessed.'"Hubby also revealed some of his influences for the video, and spoke about his reasons for using vintage editing techniques. “There’s a great retro feeling to the song that got me thinking about early synth pop and 80s iconography from Liquid Sky to Kate Bush. To keep a bit of that retro feel I stayed away from After Effects and used only basic video effects that have an 8-bit feel. I also love the classic graphic design concepts of Maurice Binder’s work on the early James Bond films and Saul Bass’s work for Hitchcock and wanted to bring some of those into the world of synth pop."Watch the video at the top of the page.Follow Noisey on Twitter.
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