I've got a weird relationship with horror movies that I'd like to be able to describe as "complicated" but that is, in reality, probably just "pretty common." I love them and I hate them. I love them because of that feeling of being ungrounded and afraid, the worrying nag that, at bottom, the universe never made any sense. I hate them because even the ones that manage to do that have to end somehow, and because of the very nature of what an ending is, they usually end up crumbling. Either the protagonist dies or she doesn't, either it was actual evil incarnate coming in through the windows or it was just the neighborhood kids pulling a prank, and every direction's been done before at least three to five times. The good horror movies make me not care, and the best ones probably aren't even horror movies to begin with.  

All of this is relevant because the S.M. Wolf music video for "Super Courage" off of this year's Canine Country Club EP that I've got the privilege of debuting right here and right now pushes some of the same buttons the best horror movies do and manages in its brevity and focus to wriggle around every pitfall. I will tell you this right now: I am afraid of meeting this video's human-like figure on my way home tonight. And yet I sense no threat from it. 

With direction by Tanner Standridge, the "Super Courage" video is a magically realist little journey following this masked and, yes, probably human figure as it sets off fireworks, dances on docks, and gazes at the freeway. Shots slow up and speed down and occasionally crackle with animated color, but it's mostly foggy and gray and nighttime in the somewhere-land of this video. 

Were I in charge and confident enough to go with my first thought, none of this is what I would've thought up for an S.M. Wolf video, whose bright psych-pop charges me more to jump up and down than to duck behind the nearest brick half-wall or worry about the state of my engine's starter. Were I in charge, the video I made would've been much worse because, having alighted on the wrong vibe, I'd have elided the horror entirely, and missed a frisson-inducing point of connection. 

Excuse the left turn into an analogy, but consider how tape distortion works: the signal's clean until it starts to rock the boat of the device's capacity, then it's steadily not so clean. S.M. Wolf are masters of rocking the boat just enough, making clean, bright, driving pop music, that bumps into standard operating procedures just hard enough to fray everything. You can hear it in Adam Gross' voice on "Super Courage" as he swings from sweet to snarling. Or in those blocks of heavy organ chords from Rachel Enneking that act like sonic mortar as they suck out headroom. S.M. Wolf starts off sounding nice, but immediately careen toward darkness and distortion. 

Standridge's video, then, is a lovely accompaniment to the track because it starts from the opposite direction and works inward until video and song meet in the middle. The mask and the fireworks and the nighttime bode ill. But then, is this fellah dancing? That mask and that aspect can't be all that bad, can it? Maybe even a little sweet? Video and song come driving inward toward one another and end up twisting around and around, each piece complicating the tone of the other.

No, neither are ever actually scary, nor horrifying. But, they work together in such a way that they arrive at a strange tension-suspended conclusion. It's the kind of thing that makes me wish every time I came out of the theater disappointed, it was this video that I had seen instead.