Kill Chicago’s horn-laden “Pull Over” stands out as a multi-facetted Ennio Morricone-inspired closing track to their 2019 album, The Fix. With a spaghetti western soundtrack, the song compares divorce to a stand-off and, as can be seen in the new video, a lot of the damage gets taken by the innocent bystanders.
Rather than the simple diametric dialogue you’d expect in a tale about a dissolving marriage, Greg Webber, Kill Chicago’s lyricist and frontman, layers the song with multiple perspectives. He shifts from narrator to narrator without always making it clear who we’re hearing at any given moment. The details of the conversation, with the cacophony and chaos of shots being fired on all sides, become less clear with each passing year.
“My parents are divorced and my songs tend to be a collage of actual conversations and moments of fiction, often speaking to myself,” says Webber. “The image of pulling the car over to argue in a “safe” manner is a real thing for people, I think. And the chorus is the swan song conversation of a marriage.”
Featuring no actual car ride in the video, the story takes on another aspect as we’re introduced to a new protagonist: the child, the middle-aged man, and the elder, all seen tied together through time by a unifying string of spaghetti.
“Spaghetti is the great equalizer of foods.”
Produced by Strike Pictures (Ariana Martinez, Gordon Mihan and Kenneth Blakney), the video is like the Pastafarian’s equivalent of the Passion of the Christ. The spaghetti represents life and it represents our struggle and it is both universal and eternal. The child, seeking familiarity and stability, consumes the spaghetti with increasing fervour until it becomes a ritual of its own.
“The idea came from my wife and the execution was Strike Pictures who were insanely professional and fun to work with,” says Webber. “Of course, it’s a Spaghetti Western, but without ham, so it’s a Spaghetti Eastern.”
Filmed at Webber’s childhood home in Keswick, New Brunswick, we’re thrust into the shared fantasy of Sergio Leone and Sigmund Freud. Just as the track is divided into two parts, the video contains two acts: the first act setting the stage with James Buchanan, Jason K. Roy and Rick Hull portraying a man determined to fill his pervading sense of emptiness with carbohydrates, and the second act dissolving into horns and the band engaging in a spaghetti sling-off.
Is it capable of filling that pervading emptiness? No amount of pasta will ever do that, but for at least a few moments, it does spark joy.