Yesterday, DMV Rapper GoldLink released a video for ‘Palm Trees/Late Night ft Masego’; both songs which appear on his debut album, And After That We Didn’t Talk.
The solidus in the title reflects the kind of disconnected connection we see between the songs. It is unusual to have two songs in one video, and they are not seamlessly intertwined; there is an eerie fade out from one into the other, where his voice washes out into “winter weather” and we are left with the sound of dismal waves.
We know from the outset of the video that a story is being told, we start at the end – which may be a warped correlation to the form of his album where the songs actually appear in reverse order. It’s interesting to see how the song finds it feet as we find the dead body of the girl; how the broken mixtape settles into beats as we realise it is indeed pathetic fallacy, and the sky reflects the tragedy of a sudden death. This fusion of light and dark is not unfamiliar to GoldLink, who constantly plays between the two.
The transition into Late Night ft Masego takes us literally into night time, and it seems strange to have to mix these songs when both clearly carry such weight on their own. On the whole the production is of high calibre, and although contains many familiar tropes – the beautiful girl, the robbery, the nightclub, the car ride –there is a kind of un-glamorised grey filter to his work which leaves it feeling raw and personal.
