Vaeda Black drop “Suicide Love” video

The video for Vaeda Black’s single “Suicide Love” is as perfect an example of a video’s potential for enhancing songwriting as you can hope to see. The seventeen year old Long Island high school student doesn’t come off as an innocent older teenager – she, instead, comes off as a woman of fully formed passions and carrying the wisdom of knowing how hot such longing can burn within. The same artistry defining her songwriting and performance define the video’s visual aesthetic. Every color is rich and sultry, overheated, yet muted. There are no flashes of ostentation.  Instead, there’s a painterly feel about the video for “Suicide Love” and it’s a quality shared by the songwriting itself.

YOU TUBE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfuZ4tNIje0

Black’s performance in the video is equally notable. She has genuine chemistry with the camera, as well, and shows her musical theatre experience through her obvious comfort performing in this vein. Her facial expressions are never too much, yet you can see she’s fully engaged with providing viewers a visual interpretation of her song. The accompanying performers are well choreographed and their dancing adds much to the song’s mood.

The gradual swell of stark piano unwinding with the song’s opening will rivet the attention of many. It is intimate, but musical, and the gossamer rise of synthesizer adds color and backdrop to an otherwise spartan introduction. It is all the more effective coupled with the video’s imagery. Black’s vocal enters without overwrought fanfare, but she establishes her presence with only a few words. She carries the song on her back, essentially, but her piano playing throughout the course of the track acts as a song of second voice she duets with throughout the course of the performance.

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/vaedablack?lang=en

It’s cut to an ideal length. Running just a little under four minutes long, the song length provides Black with an ample enough of a canvas she thoroughly explores the song’s themes. The aforementioned attentive listen likewise reveals Black places great importance on her lyric writing; the words for “Suicide Love” are clearly more than just some fragmented lines filling out the vocal melody and there just to give herself something to sing.

Vaeda Black is a definitely more than your average cookie cutter talent circa 2018. Instead, she emerges on the scene like promise long deferred, among the vanguard of a dawning new generation of writers and performers capable of carrying popular music onward in a meaningful way. “Suicide Love” is extremely impressive and even the hardest musical cynic will have a difficult time refuting the all around excellence of her presentation.

The marriage of video and music is ideal. Each bears the hallmarks of a standalone work of art in its respective medium and yet they are irreversibly connected, feeding from and into one another, when taken as a whole. It makes her achievement with this release all the more remarkable. Like many of the greatest talents in art, Black’s passion for self expression flared early at the age of seven and now burns with searing heat and lights the way towards a promising future for this young artist.

SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/track/1M4yHDPoyFzcI0z0D1UVaA?autoplay=true&v=T

Michael Rand