City Rain Makes Time Their Bitch In "I'm Gone" Video

​Philadelphia's spacey, electro rockers City Rain have been really reorganizing Rocks Off's brains lately. Their music is so far all over the synthetic landscape that we don't have any real idea where to pin down the little bastards. They aren't as poppy as Hyperbubble, or as dark as Asmodeus X, or as funky as Chromeo.

Instead, there's almost something... folky... about their beeps and boops. Like maybe if Tom Petty really got into Kraftwerk at some point. Whatever it is, City Rain is definitely not treading the common ground.

Their publicist, knowing Rocks Off's love of interesting music videos, sent over the YouTube link to City Love's "I'm Gone." On the surface, it's not much, just two guys messing around in the back of a pickup truck. Here in Houston, we call that being 17.

However, once you really let yourself be drawn into the video, the song becomes hypnotic. The footage itself has been sped up several times the rate of normal fourth-dimensional strolling, yet inexplicably, the band sings in perfect time with their droning ballad. As the landscape behind them speeds away into the nothingness of rural Pennsylvania, the message of escape that they are singing so succinctly about tugs you right through.

Maybe it's just that as we get further and further from our 30th birthday everything seems to speed up, and we feel the world gutterball through space just a little bit more keenly. [Wait until 35 - Ed.] Don't think that "I'm Gone" is some depressing ode to mortality, though. It's not. City Rain definitely puts the grin in chagrin, and their tune is suitable for normal folks and sad bastards alike.

Don't take our word for it, though. See for yourself.

Rocks Off sat down with City Rain's Ben Runyan and Jarrett Zerrer (via the Internet) for a little chat about their song. Visit Page 2 to read.