The music video for Antagonista’s last release, “Indigenous Geometry,” reflected the DIY, up-and-coming nature of their current position as artists. It was a well-crafted video that made use of what could be described as a basic blank canvas. They do not yet have the budget of say, someone like Katy Perry, who can dream up anything and everything and make it happen at the drop of a lot of dimes. The song itself, like its accompanying video, was dark, tense, and musically, a little off kilter. One of those songs that makes you think, “This feels off. What’s wrong here?” before it all comes together right before your eyes. It makes sense. They lure you into a false sense of… security? Awkward curiosity? Whatever it is, Antagonista, an alternative, I guess you could say, band out of Brooklyn, did it well with “Indigenous Geometry.” The video hit a respectable 30,000 YouTube views and, just a little over half a year later, the band is back with a new song and video called, “Sidestep To Appease.”

These guys, apparently, like to keep people on their toes. “Indigenous Geometry” fits right in with New York’s vibrant and competitive music scene… seemingly the kind of song you’d hear in a dark, packed club in the heart of Brooklyn at 2 a.m. on a Friday night. Where those with some sort of “normal job” come to escape their mundane schedules at the start of the weekend to drink beer and thrash their bodies around the room, either onstage or off. Where the ones who wouldn’t be caught dead at Radio City or the Kings Theatre go to get their fix. “Sidestep To Appease” is, quite literally, the complete opposite of that. The intro sounds like something you’d hear on Wallows most recent album, but at the :20 second mark, the shift happens. Now it’s more Tame Impala than Wallows. When lead singer Sean Davenport starts singing, just up near his head voice with vocal production that makes him sound like he’s singing in the stairwell of an apartment building, it REALLY sounds like they went to see Tame Impala at one of their Barclays Center shows in March and said, “That’s our next move, but darker.” And like… they did it. It sounds old school and retro, yet still as musically and lyrically complex as “Indigenous Geometry.”

​The accompanying music video shows the group as restaurant staff, portraying a bartender, a manager, and a back-of-house chef. It is wonderfully descriptive in its choices, even the small ones, like syncing drum hits with ever-so-slight camera zooms at just before the one-minute mark. All three members double as customers in the video. Davenport shows off his bartending skills, jiggering the standard amount of liquor and shaking the contents of his bar tools like a pro… very Tom Holland of him. His second character is a very wasted bar patron, who looks like he might pass out right at any given moment from the second he walked in the door. He sits at the bar, and orders another drink, likely incoherently. The bartender version of Davenport serves him the drink, despite his conditionand despite everything your taught as a bartender in regard tosafety. At this moment, the intention of lyrics like, “On a face-to-face level I can talk to my own devils,” and, “I lie about my dreams and I lie in my dreams,” come to fruition. It would appear that the group is acknowledging that we all have our demons, and we act on them even to the extreme, but that others will often allow us to participate in destructive behavior. They just turn a blind eye, then say, “Wow, I wish I had said/done something,” later on, often when it’s too late. The title of the song gives it away instantly. “Sidestep To Appease,” … a brilliant, uncommon way of describing how we allow the people we love to get away with things we know will hurt them. Sometimes it’s easier that way, and you just… hope for the best. 

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