by Ned Raggett

Nobody can accuse French act Solor Dolorosa of not meaning it, man.  (Not when they’ve been working away one way or another since 2001.) Happily the self-identified gothic/death rock and cold wave group has found a note perfect collaborator in the form of director Liv Weiss, who has as her own motto the phrase “crafting soulful videos for dark music.” Having already directed videos for two songs from Solor Dolorosa’s 2017 album Apollo (get it from Amazon), Weiss makes it a third with “The End,” which Burning Ambulance is premiering today.

Centered around an artistic and supernatural riff on a reasonable question—just what has happened to older movie theater employees who ran projectors when the industry has rapidly switched over to digital?—“The End” tells the story of one such person, slightly bedraggled and scrounging through old canisters of film, when he stumbles across a reel that perhaps he should have left unscreened. The popular combination of modern cinematic techniques and riffs on old celluloid that’s been stressed and damaged is in good hands with Weiss (the beach scenes alone are really striking, you can almost feel cold winds off the water), while the crisp, soaring arrangement of the song itself, led by Andy Julia’s coolly yearning vocals, transform what could have been a horror movie situation into something more aspirational and romantic.

Watch “The End”: