Unpacking a Track: High Vis's "Mind's a Lie"
I’ll write it in my journal that July 31, 2024 was the day the UK band High Vis got me interested in house music. They released a new single from their forthcoming LP Guided Tour, “Mind’s a Lie".”
Blending, the band’s last release, is a recent classic in aggressive sincerity with arena-filling musicality. “Mind’s a Lie” is something really different, and a song I’ve been interested in unpacking to understand why I might like it more than most High Vis songs, and I like most High Vis songs.
As a listener and concert attendee, I’m pretty stiff. Most of my music appreciation happens in my head. It’s unusual that I dance at all, I don’t even really head bang, I sort of do this lazy bob from my shoulders, but generally never rotating or moving anything below my abdomen. “Mind’s a Lie” has me going.
The song contains unfamiliar sonics for High Vis. It begins with the sound of a subway merging into a persistent dance beat with a looping vocal from DJ Ell Murphy, eventually transitioning into a splatter of drums introducing Graham Sayle’s vocals. As a singer, Sayle is a bit of an autograph for the band. He does his best at some melody in songs like “Trauma Bonds” and “Morality Test” off of 2022’s Blending. But his real force of delivery comes in the songs when his shouted vocals deceive his Merseyside slur that gives High Vis, in all of their modernity, an anchor of working class irritation and emotionalism. His stab of a first verse in “Mind’s a Lie” is closer to the nearly spoken-word, rap-adjacent delivery when Sayle seems most informing of a specific psychological interior for people with expansive private existences but are never perceived as more than their labor.
Lyrically, “Mind’s a Lie” is somewhere in between descriptive and ambiguous, neither of those being better or worse than the other.
Do you wanna giz a chance to try?
Cross the line just to get by
Exhaust the fuel, we rinsed it dry
What is truth when your mind's a lie?
What is truth when your mind's a lie?
Once Sayle starts singing the first verse, the house beat drops and real drums come in, but a portion of the vocal loop stays, making the song evolve into a kind of punk electronica, and then the full vocal loop returns as a chorus of a kind after Sayle’s verse. So far, this is a song moving in and out of a house beat, to a house beat with hardcore-adjacent vocals, to a house beat, and then seguing into a pre-chorus with guitar jabs seemingly in honor of The Cult’s best modulation swirls—another sonic signature of High Vis, and why the band with real hardcore bona fides is signed to Dais and not Daze.
Even though the song has plenty of live instruments, (a driving, motorik bass line, drums, and the choral guitars), the whole arrangement seems to lean towards its dance club pulse.
The band did a really good job with the music video, too. It’s fairly ambiguous: a young man shown in various moments of paranoia, anger, retaliation, and then eventually a confusing peace. The mood of the video tracks with the mood of the song. The series of negative emotions aligning with Sayle’s verse delivery, and then bliss during the chorus.
The character during the chorus seems ultimately indifferent to life and is slowly dancing in circles, smoking a cigarette, and drinking a beer, with two middle fingers up at something off camera, but I’m going to say it’s directed at life in general or maybe a past form of himself.
After the first chorus, the narrative of the video turns to focus on the character’s existence in what looks like a kind of working-class routine of chicken shops, peering out from council building balconies, and play-fighting with a friend.
Finally we see that the character trains as a boxer, sparring with Sayle in the most constructive moment in the video. And the chronology suddenly becomes unclear. Is it in order? Is the character building something positive in his life toward the end, or is the introductory scene of him picking up a brick to throw the end of the narrative and we’re watching in reverse order of events? Is he finding peace through constructive violence or is his violence indiscriminate?
If you want to continue the discussion, send me an email or put it through the snail mail
HERE TO LISTEN LLC
PO BOX 725
BRATTLEBORO, VT 05302
You can listen to the radio show on Brattleboro's community station WVEW every Sunday at 12pm EST
Here to Listen show archives are available here
You can buy Here to Listen merch here