By Deuce
Lil T-Shirt’s recently released music video, “Summer”, is one viewers won’t soon forget. The images are stark—slow motion stills of a Stockholm glen, women dressed in all white toting 12 gauges, a man silently pushed to the depths of a placidly calm sea. None of it makes sense, none of it attempts to offer an explanation for these actions, most of all the lyrics, which seem to interminably echo the refrain of ‘summer love’.
These transporting visuals, however, do well to capture the transcendent feel of the less than three minute track that sounds like almost anything but a summertime anthem—which likely explains why the video was released at the end of autumn/beginning of winter. The vocals are forlorn, dripping with effects, while the track itself—barren, bass heavy, plodding along—couches what could very well be post-teenage angst about a love affair conceivably gone awry.
Director Ottilia Wahl chose the imagery for this piece well. The entire shoot is populated by only four characters, including the soon-to-be-vanished singer. While Lil T-Shirt runs through perhaps a verse and a half of high notes, he’s aimlessly bounced along in the back of a pickup driven by a possibly spurned (ex-?) lover. The video’s strength is in its singularity—the bearing of firearms of the threesome receiving the truck’s driver in a heartfelt embrace, the flame of a cigarette being lit, the welcome toast after the deed is done and the singer’s disappeared into the murky depths.
A more straightforward singer would have titled this one “Autumn”. Perhaps it’s the irony in Lil T-Shirt, and his testimony as an artist, that these themes, echoed in the music to “Summer” that he produced and which reverberates throughout his vocals, made him punctuate this haunting melody with a decidedly specious title. In any event it works well, as does the track itself.
