5X Platinum-certified alternative rock mainstays The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus released their sixth album X’s For Eyes via Better Noise Music on October 3 along with latest single, “Perfection.”
Against the track’s intense driving rhythm and a big, urgent melody, lead vocalist, guitarist, and founding member Ronnie Winter sings “Whatever won’t break can make us” with his signature wide-ranging voice.
Today (October 17), they’ve released the song’s evocative video ahead of their two performances this weekend at the When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas as part of the band’s nationwide tour.
Watch the video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tppa5XcNwY&feature=youtu.be
THE RED JUMPSUIT APPARATUS has teamed up once again with director Shane Drake (Panic! At The Disco, Paramore), who was behind the camera lens for the “False Pretense” and “Your Guardian Angel” videos from the band’s 2006 double-Platinum debut album, DON’T YOU FAKE IT.
In the “Perfection” video, the viewer meets five diverse characters, each of whom are society’s marginalized outcasts who fit neither traditional western nor typical emo cultures, each isolated with X’s painted over their eyes. They are a trans truck mechanic, a disabled rodeo dreamer, an indigenous goth, a queer runaway, and a plus-size punk cowgirl. They’re mysteriously summoned by divine flyers featuring the band’s Alliance logo, which glows with warm light when they touch it, and they immediately look up with sudden knowing that they’ve been called to a special performance by the band. There they experience collective awakening, they simultaneously open their eyes and the X’s disappear, and they discover their chosen family.
Winter points out that “Perfection” is “a song about perfect imperfections, about embracing one’s flaws and the true beauty that lies within. It’s a song about individuality, self-acceptance, and the idea that our scars and imperfections make us who we are. Through the lens of perfectly imperfect, what some might consider to be mistakes, flaws, and shortcomings suddenly become good, beautiful, even desirable. It’s a reminder,” he adds, “that being perfectly imperfect is something not to hide but to celebrate.”
“I think that anybody who’s been with us the whole time realizes that we’ve been an activist band since 2006,” Winter says. “So when I see X’s for eyes, it reminds me of the childhood cartoons, the video games—all those things where this is what happens when you don’t do the right thing. You see that character that you know and love, but for three seconds with a bunch of swirling birds over their head and they’ve got X’s for eyes because they made a mistake. They trusted the wrong person, they went in the wrong direction, they chose the wrong path and then POW! Something crazy happens and there’s X’s for eyes, or ‘RIP.’ And I just find that has a parallel reality to now.”
Stream/purchase X’s For Eyes
https://rja.lnk.to/
