Jordan Altergott
Audio By Carbonatix
From left to right: Cooper Dickerson, Xavier Robinson, Zane DeLuccie and Mackenzie Broadhurst of Gestalt.
Jordan Altergott
The members of Denver pop-rock band Gestalt are painting the world in bright colors. That’s most evident in their new music video for “Connect the Dots,” directed by Jordan Altergott, which Westword is premiering below.
The video is rich with pinks, blues and oranges, though the emo song is largely about miscommunication in relationships — represented through various antics, from crushing pink eggs to cutting a telephone cord.
Drummer Xavier Robinson plays the role of a detective — at one point arranging sticky notes and thumbtacks on a board to literally try and connect the dots — to figure out what’s going wrong in a relationship.
To represent the lyrics “The way that we’ve been on, too much for chewing at the rate that we bit off, so the steak is why I’m here,” guitarist Cooper Dickerson spent a week creating a mold of a steak out of clay. He poured Jello into the mold and created a bright-blue steak that he eats in the video.
The band, which first formed at and eventually built its fan base at house shows, has always had a DIY sensibility when it comes to making and performing music. More recently, Gestalt signed with 3rd and James, an independent record label that’s home to other Denver musicians such as Kayla Ruby and Foxfield Four.
“Connect the Dots” is the band’s first single with the label, and Broadhurst says it’s the group’s first track “almost entirely manufactured in the studio.”
Jumping off the excitement of signing with a new label, the bandmates were ready to hit the road earlier this year and keep cranking out music, but their plans were put on pause by the pandemic, and DeLuccie eventually contracted COVID-19. These days, the band is taking safety seriously.
“We don’t want to be the people that bend the rules with these little shows,” says band manager Anthony Borders. Instead, he points out, “it’s a good time to reinvent who we are and what we want to look like.”
“Connect the Dots” will be available on all streaming platforms on November 13.
