Two grocery store workers get off work and decide to relax with a couple beers. They come across an unsuspecting shopping cart and take rides in it. Maybe they wipe out a couple times. Things escalate from there, at the expense of the shopping cart. Which is when the shopping cart decides to take its revenge, and mayhem ensues.
The video is for “Crisis Shopper,” one of the songs off S.G. Carlson and the Tines’ new EP, The Enemy Is Listening, and the work of putting together both video and EP, for Carlson, was about assembling a group of talented friends, giving them a few songs, and letting their ideas take the wheel.
“I’m always loved old horror movies — especially the bad ones,” Carlson said. The Enemy Is Listening doesn’t have much to do with Halloween. But, Carlson said, “I like putting things out on a fun day.” His last record, Sing the Hits, came out on April Fool’s Day. And “I’ve always liked Halloween,” he said. If he chose that day, “I thought it’d be fun to do B‑horror movie videos with it.”
But Carlson said, the idea of making a horror music video wasn’t his to begin with. The video was made by are filmmakers Haley Copes, Alexis Villa, and Evan Kmec, whose work Carlson admired. Carlson told Copes “I wanted her to make a music video,” and she should “come up with any idea she wanted.” She could also “pick any song she wanted” off the record.
Copes picked “Crisis Shopper,” and came up with the idea of a B‑horror short to accompany it. In the tradition of cult classic Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, the antagonist could be a normally inanimate object. In this case, it’s a “shopping cart that stalks and kills me.” There are four actors in the video, one of which is himself, “one of which is Bill Saunders, and one of which is a shopping cart.” The “props department,” he said, “procured shopping carts from various locations around town.” Carlson and Greg Poore, of the band Bajzelle, play grocery store employees “who are mean to a cart at work, and the cart seeks revenge.” The film was shot around New Haven.
Carlson said a second horror-themed video is in the works as well, starring Brian Robinson as a “disembodied head who just wants to make friends.”
“I’ve had a lot of success letting people do what they do well,” Carlson said. “Just let them loose.”
Brian Slattery Photo
Carlson.
The philosophy extended to the making of the album itself. The Enemy Is Listening, Carlson said, is “louder than the last record was. Definitely more rock ‘n’ roll.” The sound began to emerge even in the writing of it. “Most of the guitar tracks were made with a guitar I got from my uncle,” Carlson said. “He lent it to me a while ago and never asked for it back. It’s the most rock ‘n’ roll guitar in the world.”
Part of the reason for that is a message on the instrument itself. “At some point he wrote ‘the enemy is listening’ on the back of the neck, so that’s the name of the EP,” Carlson said. It’s “the coolest thing to have written on a guitar since ‘this machine kills fascists,’” Carlson deadpanned.
Another part of the reason is that the EP was the first one Carlson made under his own name with a full band. Carlson initially convened the band — Ilya Gitelman on lead guitar, Mike Skaggs, Jr. on bass, and J. Thompson on drums — to play the songs on Sing the Hits live. “We were going to have a record release show in early May.” That show, obviously, was cancelled. But “we wanted to keep playing,” Carlson said. “So I said, ‘let’s do four or five new songs,’” and “it became a recording project.”
Carlson plays rhythm guitar and sings vocals. “I’m a drummer first,” Carlson said, so “the only way I could have another drummer was to have someone better than me, and J. definitely is.” Gitelman is Carlson’s bandmate from Ports of Spain. “He plays all the lead guitar parts and has contributed a lot to the sound of the record,” making it more aggressive and psychedelic. And Skaggs was an obvious choice for bass, as he played all the bass parts on Sing the Hits to begin with.
“The last album was very sandboxy — me trying out a lot of stuff,” Carlson said. For The Enemy Is Listening, Carlson gave much more rein to his bandmates. “This one was kind of a trust fall,” he said, and “I’m very happy with the results.”
The album is coming out on Free As Birds, the New Haven-based record label musician Alex Burnet started in the spring to support the three albums Burnet oversaw of area musicians making music during quarantine. Free As Birds was created using arts relief funds from the city, and gave profits back to that fund. Carlson applauded the funded but also noted that “it is funny that it took an international pandemic to get funding for the arts.”
Carlson mentioned that musicians more routinely get state support in other countries, like Canada or Germany. In the United States, “we’ve always been in a tenuous position, trying to get grants.”
For himself, he’s hoping to get enough revenue from The Enemy Is Listening to do another release. With that in mind, he’s making three of the EP’s five tracks available for streaming, which makes the vast majority of artists almost no revenue at all. “Having music on Spotify has devalued it,” Carlson said. “No one gets paid except Spotify.” Buying the digital version — say, on Bandcamp — yields a fourth song. Buying a CD gets the fan five songs — and Carlson and Free As Birds get support.
Many people, Carlson felt, “think that arts and entertainment are not worth money,” he said, and yet “they spend all their free time indulging in it.” Meanwhile, he said, “local labels and local art exist for you, and if you don’t support them, they disappear.”
The Enemy Is Listening will be released on Oct. 31, but is available for preorder now through Bandcamp.