This is what self-described “doom-trap” artist Mimi Barks poetically states about her cover of Linkin Park’s hit “Crawling”:
Crawling isn’t reborn, it remembers.
A raw phantom in the wires,
A resonance of the silence Chester left behind.
Because some wounds don’t heal, they echo.
As the music video begins, a delicate ballerina spins inside a music box to the song’s iconic opening notes. With riveting drums by the Dutch drummer KOEN, and the aid of production and polishing Owen Clexton, I wondered, where is this all going to go?
Next, we pan to scenes of neon hair in a mirror, dripping blood in a dark, graffiti-covered bathroom. The drumkit propels it forward, bright and subtly, ever-so-slightly-trappy. The first syncopated line enters just before the bass drops. We pan to white, haunting eyelashes, and (then) begin to focus on bandaged fingers, and long nails which reach out and grab us through the screen as we crescendo into the chorus.
This version of the song is pain incarnate, the desperation that comes with a wound so deep that one will always remember it. There are a plethora of heartrending psychedelic visual moments where the artist’s face is warped, inside water, or even upside down. Eerie, affecting.
Vocally, there is much more distortion inside Bark’s version than the original, but somehow, the distraught feeling remains in the same wheelhouse. As the camera spins as we watch this person alone in the bathroom, another intense tale of pain told. As the final scene pans, we glance and the horror-movie scene we are left with: Pale legs against crimson, a stretched corset on a rack.
