This is where I escape my yesterdays,
and put on another face,
Because all the world’s a stage.
You choose the clothes, draw a line around your eyes, and wait for the hour when a room full of strangers might let you become someone you struggle to be in daylight. For a shy person, going out dancing can promise a few hours of freedom from the self-consciousness that follows them everywhere else. Taking the stage raises the stakes: now everyone is looking, and somehow that can make it easier to be yourself. What happens to that freedom when the lights come up?
Massachusetts post-punk group Ghost Painted Sky pursue that question in the new video for “Sound and Fury,” premiering today alongside their eight-track album Failure Blooms. When Wood sings “Because all the world’s a stage,” she invokes Jaques’s speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The title also recalls Macbeth’s “sound and fury” speech, which imagines life as a player’s brief turn onstage. Those lines cast the song’s new face in an intriguing light: Wood chooses a part for one night, hoping the room can release her from yesterday. She knows that freedom may exist only in her mind, yet the feeling remains powerful while the music plays.
An icy gothic rock guitar figure opens the track before a midrange post-punk bassline and heavy, splashing drums pull it forward. As the riff grows more melodic, its contours bring The Cure and the Comsat Angels to mind. Lisa Wood sings with control and conviction, holding something in reserve until the latter part of the song. A striking guitar break gives the arrangement room to breathe before her voice returns with greater force. The result carries the full-bodied feel of mid-eighties post-punk and gothic rock, with a band’s physical momentum at its center.
The video spends much of its time with Wood and the band onstage, lit in violet and pink as images move across the screen behind them and people dance in front. Near the end, the scene shifts to Wood applying makeup at a mirror. That private moment gives the performance a beginning beyond the stage: someone has to decide to go out, get ready, and face the room.
For founder and songwriter David Strong, that journey extends well beyond musicianship:
“Sound and Fury is kind of a meditation on the public faces we wear, and what we attach to that, especially in some kind of ‘scene’ or social construct. Lyrically, at the core, it’s about public performance, whether ‘officially’ as a creative figure/musician/vocalist, or just someone who is just out and about, seeing and being seen, and what all that can mean…”
Wood recognizes the same anticipation in a night out and a show. “I get super excited about performing, I pretty much spend most of my mundane daily life just waiting to perform again. I live for it. Before I began singing publicly, I had a similar sort of exhilaration about going out dancing, and socializing. We sort of aimed to capture all of this in the video.”
The change she feels onstage is more than a costume. As Wood puts it: “I feel like I’m typically shy with people, but when I get on stage something blooms in me. Performing what we’ve created I feel a collective energy with the crowd, a powerful ability to overcome any of that shyness…like a different person almost.”
Watch the video for Sound and Fury below:
Strong founded Ghost Painted Sky as a solo project in 2014; Wood joined on vocals in 2018 and has since become the band’s primary singer. Today, Strong’s songwriting and multi-instrumental work meet Wood’s vocals and lyrics and Michael Boudreau’s guitar. Developed over several years, Failure Blooms contains eight new recordings, some of them extensively reworked from earlier releases or live performances. William Faith mixed and mastered the album at 13 Studio.
Across the record, the band takes on isolation, longing, depression, addiction, and the hard work of changing. Its title comes from Wood’s cover art, which imagines growth fed by what came before it. Strong describes the image as depicting “the process of using your past failures and miseries as fertilizer for new growth and blossoming…the concept that only from the muck, mire, and rotted debris can a healthy thing of beauty bloom…” The title’s optimism has soil under its fingernails.
Failure Blooms is out now on CD and digital formats. Listen below and order the album here.
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