Objects In Motion – River Road

There is a daydream-like quality to the music of Objects in Motion, a warm embrace of nostalgic reflection that allows the listener to close their eyes and survey a present that’s informed by where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

That shines through with a colorful potency on “River Road,” where the past not only informs the sound of the Boston indie dream-pop band, but also its sentiment, embracing everything there is to love about seeing the world and experiencing the wonder of the vibrant cross-cultural influences that shape us, eliciting a sense of discovery and appreciation for our surroundings.

The lead single to Objects in Motion’s debut summer EP, inside outside upside downside, this effervescent track, showcasing the trio’s self-described “lush gauze” sound, now receives the music video treatment on Tuesday, October 27.

The video arrives a few short weeks after the band returns to the live stage, playing The Lizard Lounge on November 19 alongside The Mail and Wood & Bone.

Filmed in one take as they travelled by car just south of Boston, the “River Road” visual finds the band – guitarist michael lantow (lower-case stylization intentional), bassist Dan Angolano, vocalist Vinda Souza, joined by a rotating cast of drummers – cruising through life as they travel through sun-soaked, tree-lined streets, evoking a sense of nostalgia and wonder that echoes the vibrant melancholy of the song.

“‘River Road’ is about childhood,” the band says. “It’s an homage to loving parental and familial relationships, growing up abroad, having a sense of connection to faraway places, being gloriously and deliciously trapped by memories, and being able to look back very fondly at our personal origins.”

They add: “So many songs are about disappointment and unmet expectations, which are, of course, themes that we explore in our music frequently. But ‘River Road’ is not that. ‘River Road’ is a celebration of our formative years and a letter of gratitude to those sources of unconditional love and support who shaped them.”

And like most things in the emerging Objects in Motion universe, the Angolano-produced “River Road” video was a creative collaboration amongst the trio. The EP was recorded earlier this year at Big Nice Studios in Rhode Island with producer Brad Krieger. So a few weeks back, as the band was headed back to the Lincoln studio for a summer party, they hopped in the car together and after a few tries, ended up filming the visual in a continuous take.

“With michael behind the wheel, Dan in the passenger seat controlling a camera mounted on the windshield, and me in the back seat, we took advantage of a glorious sunny day and tree-lined Massachusetts streets that provided natural special effects, courtesy of the sun shining through the leaves and creating shadows and strobe lighting onto my face,” Souza recalls. 

Like any great road trip, the “River Road” video is an invitation for listeners to come along and ride with Objects in Motion as their debut EP unfolds. It’s simply the first stretch of a much larger journey.

“As the song is about traveling through life, we aimed to capture that dynamic through the visual motif of the outside world imparting color, shadow, and light,” they add. “‘River Road’ is accessible, catchy, and has an energy that feels very collective and forward. It sets the stage for the songs that surround it.”

After Objects in Motion released inside outside upside downside back in July, the trio wanted to illuminate some of the themes that flow through the record, a kaleidoscopic pinwheel of sound built upon a sonic foundation of pedal-heavy and lush guitar, driving bass, underlayers of synth, and dramatic, reverbed vocals. Taken from a lyric in opening track “Incandescent,” inside outside upside downside carries four songs that are thematically intertwined to reflect each of the four words in the title. 

They each emit a glow of alt-rock, new wave, shoegaze, and dream-pop, all echoed through that “lush gauze” description, a play on shoegaze but “with an undercurrent of feeling like we’re performing from inside the ocean surrounded by layers of fabric,” as they playfully put it. 

And while a nostalgic appreciation and joy resides at the surface of “River Road,” that’s just one of the many aural emotions explored over the EP’s 12-minute runtime, where sweeping, anthemic, multi-layered harmonies and catchy, jangle-pop instrumentation feels like the record would be as home in the 1980s as the 2020s, its tracks nestled somewhere in the extended universe of Sarah Records or the C86 compilation.

“The EP songs are such a necessary foundation on which rests the band and what we stand for, and where we’re going,” Objects in Motion say. “It reflects where we were when we recorded it, which was a quartet of musicians and friends influenced by a variety of genres and trying to scratch our musical itches on all of them at once. If you took musical creatives, all of whom co-write and have input into each song, most of whom are multi-instrumentalists, all of whom would consider themselves educated and intellectually curious, and then assume they’re bringing the types of sounds they love to hear and love to make into a single room…well, that’s the EP.” 

The aforementioned “Incandescent” is a buoyant indie-pop cruise that’s perhaps the happiest song about pure, unfettered anger to emerge from Boston this year. It lyrically wades into feelings of being trapped, caged, patronized, and subdued into a denial of oneself, an active state of internal oppression. “Implicit within it is a longing to seek revenge but wittily, and with a light touch, and an acknowledgment that some harsh lessons are self-inflicted,” the band reveals. “This ties to the idea of the ‘inside,’ and was the first real song we wrote as a band, and it came together in a jam session.”

Naturally, “River Road” takes things “outside,” embracing a joie de vivre, a passion for discovery, and absorbing everything there is to love about seeing the world and experiencing the wonder of the vibrant cross-cultural influences that shape us.

The “upside” comes into focus with the wonderfully-titled, and regionally relevant, “Allston Christmas Ham,” with its droning, ‘gazing sound that splits a line between rock and alt-country (courtesy of some pedal steel and multiple guitar layers and flourishes). “This track has both a reflective and soaring feel,” the band continues. “In fact, ‘soaring’ is a prominent callback throughout the song, both sonically and lyrically, encouraging all of us to rise above that which is expected of us and transcend our limitations.”

And EP closer “Don’t Look Down” creates an expanse of sound that veers into moody post-punk territory, bringing a sense of paranoia into the band’s sound spectrum. “If ‘River Road’ was about the beauty and joy of the big wide world and ‘Allston Christmas Ham’ was about limitlessness, ‘Don’t Look Down’ is about small-town thinking, self-doubt, making safe and uninteresting life choices, and feeling gleefully contented with the ordinary and unambitious,” they offer. “Being a big fish in a small tank is only an achievement if you don’t want the room to grow.”

Heard together, it showcases a new band drawing from a lifetime of events and influences to create a record that’s reflective of the modern day: nuanced, layered, and atmospheric, with a throughline that ebbs and flows based on whims and moods.  

“The lyrics are complex, and tell cohesive and deeply intentional stories that are, while informed by personal experience, reflective of universal commonalities,” Souza shares.

And it’s a sonic composite sketch from three equal players, partners and contributors, where lantow, Angolano, and Souza lend their own creative vision to one cohesive, and yet still eclectic, sound.

“We like each other as people,” they say with a laugh. “We all have day jobs and careers and busy lives and responsibilities, and we are all passionate and made whole by music, and from the minute we first hung out with each other we had a desire not just to create, not just to collaborate, but to connect. Our rehearsals are as much about eating together and talking and laughing as they are about making music, and despite all being very different human beings, it’s that underlying cohesion and care for each other that translates into interesting sounds, and a feeling that can be heard.”

From inside outside upside downside to the “River Road” video to the freshly-written batch of new songs that will comprise the band’s next release, perhaps sometime in 2027, the core ethos of Objects in Motion is to explore the layers of emotion that reside in all of us. That means the good and the bad, the welcome and the shunned.

As “River Road” glows with a familial sense of joy and optimism, using a reflection on the past to help shape sentiments of the present, the camaraderie between the band members is just as influential as any record from their respective collection. And that allows plenty of room for organic exploration, thematically or stylistically, where a carefree attitude lets their sound and vision develop naturally. 

“While arguably all three of us have to make music because it’s so core to who we are, we do not have to make music with each other,” they conclude. “The fact that we want to, and that the music we create together is so compelling, is a testament not just to our diversity of style, but also to our friendship.”

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