Demola’s new music video for the Wande Coal-collaboration “Light Up”

A brand new Lamborghini pulls up outside of a stately mansion surrounded by tropical green vegetation. Out steps a sharp-dressed Demola, whose calm demeanor as he gazes upon this estate epitomizes what it is to be cool. He steps through the front door and proceeds to head upstairs, where he’s joined by two utterly breathtaking females ready to welcome him home. In Demola’s new music video for the Wande Coal-collaboration “Light Up,” viewers are invited into a living daydream that the critically acclaimed pop singer conjures up for us with immaculate ease. The beats are the biggest draw in this song, but the video that was made to illustrate their happy-go-lucky tone is perhaps even more evocative than the music that drives its imagery.

Wande Coal is poolside, chilling at this majestic mansion while Demola starts a small fire with the fantastically melodic friction that his bow and violin emit. Hundreds of multicolored umbrellas hang in the air in a sublime display of surrealism, but their appearance doesn’t trigger a sudden slide into postmodernity in “Light Up.” The show is just getting on the road, and soon the video is flooded with partygoers that are intent on exploiting this erotic percussive sway for every ounce of magic that it’s worth. It’s difficult to avoid becoming captivated by the visuals here, but the music makes it a little easier for us to split our attention between the enticing images and the illustrious instrumental backdrop that they’re expressing so bluntly without ever speaking a single word to us.

 

 

Demola and Wande Coal share the mic duties remarkably well in “Light Up,” and I was actually taken aback by how hot their chemistry was when I first sat down to analyze this track last week. They’ve each got a big personality that tends to dominate whatever music they happen to be making at the moment, but they never clash or end up competing for the lion’s share of our affections in this song; on the contrary, they’re playing off of each other’s cues and making the flow of the verses really smooth. They could make an entire album out of this formula, and I for one wouldn’t mind reviewing it if they did.

“Light Up” stops on a dime and leaves a haunting silence in its wake that, no matter how many times I listen to this single, inspires me to fill the dead air with more slow jams in the spirit of the summer season. It gets the party started better than most of the underground pop songs that I’ve heard lately have, and I think that the music video for the track is a good representation of the artistic identity that Demola has fashioned for himself in recent years. He’s not done growing as an artist, but he’s cultivating a sound in “Light Up” that I’m very eager to hear more of, and I’m absolutely positive that I am not the only music journalist or critic who is saying as much right now. He and Wande Coal are on a roll at the moment, to say the very least.

Mindy McCall