Paul Cauthen makes a pretty convincing fire-and-brimstone preacher in the dark new video for “Holy Ghost Fire,” a track from his upcoming album Room 41. The Texas native’s second album, Room 41 will be released September 6th.
The clip begins with a gravelly sermon about the struggle against forces of darkness, which turns out to be spoken by the barkeep in an old-timey brothel. Cauthen, meanwhile, is decked out in a red hat and black duster, zealously witnessing to the ladies at the brothel while seemingly being consumed by his fleshly desires. The spacious, blues-funk groove adds to that overall feeling of sexual tension, with Cauthen purring about being “an honest man, dying to get you in the palm of my hand/Working the long-con plan.” It’s not quite clear if the preacher’s desires get the better of him in the video, but it definitely becomes clear that he’s going nowhere with the woman who catches his eye in the opening scenes.
The groove-based arrangement of “Holy Ghost Fire” fits in nicely with the humid, debauched first release from Room 41, “Cocaine Country Dancing,” which came out in June. Room 41, named for the space at Dallas, Texas’s famed Belmont Hotel where Cauthen frequently stays, is the follow-up to 2016’s full-length My Gospel and the 2018 EP Have Mercy.
Cauthen is set to head to Europe for a series of dates in late August but will return home to Dallas to play a show at the Kessler Theater the same day that his album comes out.
