Ancient Christians used the symbol of Ichthys, a fish-like shape comprised of a pair of inverted arches commonly found adorning the trunklids and liftgates of today’s automobiles as a secret means of identifying fellow members of their order in a time when the followers of Christ were heavily persecuted by the Roman Empire. Placed at the entrances of Christian tombs, Ichthys represented Jesus’s resurrection and encouraged safe passage from earthly resting places to the elysian fields of eternal bliss.
Life, as science teaches us, began not with a god-like snap but in the seas as ancient fish took the first slithering steps from foamy oceanic broth onto dry land, transitioning to another plane of existence in a process so engrained in the very essence of this planet’s evolutionary history that the concept has lived on in our animal brains across the epochs, reinterpreted through myth and fable to become an integral part of many dominant cultural faiths. Fish are prominently featured throughout Naked Sun’s latest video, “Jesus,” a searingly intense existential conflict of biblical scale raging across the expanse between life and death.
Loud, chugging guitars muscle against concussive drums to incite a stoned out prehistoric mosh lurching and swaying along to a surprisingly mellow bass groove that manages to keep the shuddering, ramshackle song from tearing itself apart at the seams. The track is tangibly heavy, but not in the thickly menacing way that typically characterizes stoner rock’s plodding, downtuned wall-of-fuzz. “Jesus” heaves into motion with terrifying unpredictability, an unhinged specter summoned into abrupt high definition by the searing flash of a strobe light amid the unceasing scream of razor-wire tinnitus. There are brief moments of reprieve when the cacophony subsides and the latent melody takes control, a contrasting calm amidst the unrelenting chaos.
Directed by The Nude Party’s Alec Castillo, “Jesus” in video form is rife with religious symbolism. Crouched on the banks of a subterranean pool, a primal figure twitches and spasms in the shallows, bare skin shining with a deathly pallor against the cold crags arching overhead like the buttresses of an ancient catacomb. A living corpse crawling across the mud, emulating the first hesitant steps of evolution’s unending march to higher ground with the helter-skelter locomotion of a macabre marionette rudely animated and left to its own devices by a disinterested puppeteer. A guiding hand reaches forth from the blackness offering salvation in the form of ritual sacrifice, a pagan ceremony and funerary procession through the decaying wasteland of civilization. The body, shrouded in white, is carried aloft by a triad of druid priests before reawakening in the darkness of night, shivering before the fiery dawn of a Native Sun burned in effigy.
In Matthew 4:19 Jesus recruits Simon and Peter, fishermen in the city of Galilee, to follow him and become “fishers of men,” casting theological nets among the teeming schools of humanity to draw forth individuals from the listless waters of confusion up onto the banks of divine salvation. This process is not far removed from the evolutionary journey our aquatic forebears made through animal strength of will, and Native Sun reinterpret this process as the video’s occult apostles awaken the humanity within a discarded and directionless man-fish in a foreboding ceremony that blurs the lines between ritual paganism and the resurrection of Christ. In a sinister twist, this awaking on the other side is not awash in light and warmth, but icy blackness illuminated by flames, foreshadowing a darker side of eternity spent growing beyond waters of creation.
On April 21st Native Sun are set to reanimate Brooklyn from its COVID coma with an electrifying sold-out, open-air set at The Sultan Room, igniting the flames of a post-pandemic renaissance in the best way possible; music, community, and faith in the enduring strength of creativity and expression together in the church of rock & roll.
Follow Native Sun on Instagram and stream “Jesus” on Spotify.
