Lawrence Arabia Shares New Video From ‘Absolute Truth’ & Announces NZ Shows.

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Lawrence Arabia has shared his excellent new video for the track The Palest of Them All. Filmed in the Christchurch’s Commodore Hotel, it pays tribute to the great Stanley Kubrick. 
Lawrence Arabia performs at the Nostalgia Festival in Christchurch on 4th of March and at the Leigh Sawmill Cafe on 24th of March.

James Milne (Lawrence Arabia) says the following about the video…

“The Commodore Hotel is out near the airport in Christchurch. One of the video’s directors, Stephen Ballantyne, and I often go there for an annual drink around Christmas time. When we first went there, around 2001, we really liked the weird limbo vibe of the airport hotel bar, plus there’s all sorts of US Antarctic Program ephemera up on the walls. Scientists and US military staff often pass through the bar there and it added a slightly cosmopolitan vibe to the place. In general it was just a much more pleasant location for a beer than most bars in Christchurch.

In 2007 I wrote a song tangentially inspired by the hotel called “The Crew Of The Commodore,” which juxtaposed a slightly psychedelic vibe with a melancholic little lyric about an imagined New Zealand space programme, whose astronauts would certainly have stayed at the Commodore if they had to stay anywhere at all.

These places and images tend to resonate down the years, and thus it came to pass that Stephen Ballantyne and Carla Brereton proposed a treatment that basically threw together some of the atmosphere from both Kubrick’s “2001” and “The Shining” and turned the legendary (in our own minds at least) Commodore Hotel into an existential prison, a purgatory of my own creation, perhaps the ultimate endpoint of a life spent travelling, running away from genuine human contact.”

Here’s what some have being saying about Absolute Truth:

“Engulfed by bittersweet nostalgia” – The Guardian
“60s-influenced pop with reflective, often bracingly direct lyrics” – Uncut
“Deeply classic and sweeping melodies” – Mojo
“Well wrought and entertaining” – The Independent
“If you have any love in your soul for fantastic pop music, you really have, and I mean have to check out Absolute Truth” 4.52am
LAWRENCE ARABIA – Absolute Truth
2016 WINNER – Best Alternative Album and Best Cover Art – NZ Music Awards

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