Check out the visuals for ‘Dancing With The Stars’ by The Silver Snails
The Silver Snails are a band with a goal (to create the world’s finest pop rock) and a mission (to open human hearts through sound, light, and word) as lofty as they come. Their uncompromising, hands-on approach to quality and craftsmanship resonates across their media and branding, starting with their calling-card song and video, “Dancing With The Stars.” An Italo-US joint venture between lead singer Lucas Ward and his wife Elisa Fantini, The Silver Snails take inspiration from the family’s rustic backdrop in the wine country of Romagna, Italy, yet fashion a contemporary, artisanal pop rock for a global audience, like a fine silk tie from a Florentine fashion house.
Songs on The Seven Melodies, the group’s ambitious, harmonically rich debut album, are sung in English, French, Italian, Mandarin, and even a bit of Sanskrit. Taking deep space (specifically the M42 nebula) as its departure point, single “Dancing With The Stars” leads with a melody that reaches for the stratosphere. The style of the group is playful and theatrical, strongly reflecting early imprinting of Beatles, Stones, Bowie, Floyd and other invasive British species.
The clip opens with the band’s official astronomer heralding their arrival with his telescope pointed at the night sky. A playful search ensues wherein the group’s young ones are found wandering an exotic beach collecting silver snails by starlight, and re-united with parents in time for glam dance scenes in sparkle and glitter. The clip ends with the famous tone sequence from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind used as an ignition code for blast-off on their flying piano. (Pop cultural riffs, historical references, symbol & allegory seem to be the band’s stock and trade…)
Beyond the sci-fi theme, “Dancing With The Stars” is a celebration of familial togetherness. Ward describes the song as his answer to Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” – an attempt to convey in song the confounding delight and awe that a new father feels as witness to the miracle of children. Daughters Jasmine and Celeste join in on the choruses, and they’re focal points of Filippo Giovannini’s lovingly crafted cinematography, as well. Everything in this idyllic clip glitters: the makeup on the faces of the musicians, the body of the grand piano set up on the sand, the costumes, the sparklers and fireworks that light up the smoke with their phosphorescence, and the glitter-painted silver snails on the keys which follow Ward as he sings.
Despite their galactic ambitions, The Silver Snails are an act distinguished by intimacy. Based around an actual nuclear family, the music they make together is warm and welcoming; the themes may be cosmic, but the sound is approachable and friendly, rooted in pop-rock tradition. And while Ward takes the guise of a spaceman in the “Dancing With The Stars” video – complete with dazzling silver body paint – he’s got to be the sweetest one in the galaxy, with a smile as bright as a constellation. Even the astronomer turns out to be part of the clan: he’s Nonno Rino, Elisa’s late father. Lucas and Elisa are inviting you to their party – one simultaneously otherworldly yet also tribal and familiar, and one where everything, from the stars to the waves to the sound of the music-makers, is lovingly knit together.
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