Joe Newman treads dangerously

At the outset Alex Takács's new promo for JJerome87 feels like it might be a tribute to the western films of old as a Stetson-wearing man and his, who's companion carrying a picnic basket, are shown among rolling green hills.

Then we cut to more men in Stetsons, this time wearing riot gear and carrying guns. Cut again to a handcuffed man, what looks decidedly like a last meal, and a doctor checking his vitals, and we're now in some sort of prison movie.

But it's when he's led out to the edge of a mountain and placed on a treadmill which, if he stops running, will see him plummet to his death, that another twist takes us into even more sinister territory. 

ProdCo’s Takács is a longtime collaborator of alt-J frontman Joe Newman, and the promo to Brush Me Like A Horse is a sun-bleached fever dream that follows a man whose crime is never disclosed as he is marched toward his own televised execution. The publicly unfolding event sees crowds gather, a television host narrate the proceedings and a rifle-wielding child watching it all through crosshairs.

With no context for the man’s alleged crime, the viewer is left without moral clarity, forced to consider whether any wrongdoing could justify a punishment so extreme and, in doing so, Takács draws empathy from the audience for the condemned. As the pageantry swells around the accused, the question is not whether he will survive, but whether he can deny the crowd the ending they came to witness.

“Brush Me Like a Horse is an acid western about a man condemned to die in a cruel, humiliating public spectacle," says Takács. "Joe Newman came to me with the vivid image of a state execution via treadmill, and it immediately conjured this whole narrative world. In Joe’s songwriting the images are layered and nested inside one another: a man is accused, the accused is a horse, the horse is a mouse in a field where cats roam. The track already contained multiple voices and characters; it cut so many strong silhouettes that my job was simply to fill them in.”