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  • Remember This? OK Go “Get Over It”

    Remember This? OK Go “Get Over It”

    Look, there's a car on the cover!
    A couple weeks ago, Chicago-based alt-rockers OK Go put out their latest born-to-be-wildly-viral video – this time, it’s essentially a commercial for the Chevy Sonic in which the band performs their song “Needing/Getting” while driving a course lined with various musical instruments that are strummed, plucked, banged, plinked, and otherwise crashed into by a seemingly random array of objects attached to the car, thus creating the song’s musical (sorta) accompaniment. Each couple of lines, the music stops as lead singer Damian Kulash frantically steers the car onto the next segment of the course, kicking up a cloud of dust and, oh I don’t know, showing off the Chevy Sonic’s handling against a picturesque landscape. It’s kinda thrilling, I guess, but it isn’t pretty.

    “Needing/Getting” (2012)

    This sort of thing is what OK Go does these days – spectacular video stunts that do less to promote a song (which, y’know, is what the original point of music videos was) and more to get clicks and likes and shares (and future sponsors). Which is all well and good, I suppose. The band have gone on record as saying that don’t really see themselves strictly as musicians, but more broadly as performers. As musicians, they’re not terribly prolific: “Needing/Getting” is from their 2010 album Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, only the third studio album they’ve released in their decade-plus-long career. By my count, this is sixth song from that album to be used in a video (one was used twice). Their songs, with few exceptions (“Needing/Getting” is not one), range from fairly decent to pretty okay – mostly likeable but generally unmemorable, were it not for, say, that “animations on toast” video (etc.) they did.

    OK Go seems to be running into the Lady Gaga problem: what do you do to top the last thing you did to top the thing you did before? Watching “Needing/Getting” made me really miss the band OK Go (as opposed to OK Go, the viral video auteurs), and it made me want to go back and re-acquaint myself with the song that introduced me to these four company-computer-guys turned awesome-semi-rock-star-guys.

    Not that there aren’t any visual gimmicks in their debut video “Get Over It” – ping pong ping pong – but the song’s the star of this particular show, and it’s really good fun just to watch these guys bash it out. As far as I’m concerned, those last choruses where it sounds like they hired Def Leppard to sing back-up are more satisfying than anything in the video for “Needing/Getting”. It’s two weeks old, and I’m already over that one. “Get Over It” rocked 10 years ago, and this relatively un-stunty video still does.

    “Get Over It” (2002)

  • New Single! Good Old War “Calling Me Names”

    New Single! Good Old War “Calling Me Names”

    Good Old War's Third Album

    So, now we know where Jason Mraz’s straw fedora went. Here’s the latest song and video from the Philadelphia folk-pop trio Good Old War, whose third album Come Back As Rain, is set to be released next week. The song’s called “Calling Me Names”, and with its sunny acoustic picking, ooh-la-la-la back-up vocals, and a chorus you’ll be singing along with before the second verse starts – callin’- callin’- callin’ me na-ee-ay-ames – this song has classic, summer car-radio hit written all over it. Add a hipstamatic video of the band singing the song in a classic car, in the summer – head out the window, birds singing in the trees, tapping the beat on the roof, running out of gas, getting out and pushing the damn thing into the glorious summer sunset because you ran out of gas…

    The band’s also offering a free download of another song from the album called “It Hurts Every Time“.

  • Free Download! Gorillaz “Do Ya Thing” from Converse

    Free Download! Gorillaz “Do Ya Thing” from Converse

    Gorillaz R 4 Realz
    If a corporation could have a hobby, I think Converse shoes has found theirs. In the last few years, Converse has opened it’s own recording studio, and every couple of months, it’s commissioned some great, unexpected collaboration singles, like last year’s irresistible “I’m a Goner” which matched indie pop duo Matt & Kim with swag rapper Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em and Andrew W.K., the original party rocker. You can still download the song for free home page, and while there, check out the behind-the-scenes footage from the making of the song’s video, which looks like it was inspired by the final scene of Summer School.

    “I’m a Goner” (2011)

    Converse’s latest collaboration single brings Gorillaz into the studio with Outkast’s Andre 3000 and LCD Soundsystem’s maestro James Murphy. It’s called “Do Ya Thing”. Check it out and download it for free here. Like any good Gorillaz song, it’s a veritable pinata of brightly colored audio sweetness – doodly doo organs, tooting horns, glitchy beats – and there’s a great contrast between lead Gorilla Damon Albarn’s jaded intro verse, and Andre’s marathon sprint, with James Murphy swooping in periodically to deliver a hilariously just-a-little-bit-off falsetto hook. The bummer about this collaboration is that this is really the sort of thing that Gorillaz does all the time – it’s not unlikely that these three artists would have been in the studio together for part of the next Gorillaz album. So while it’s great to have a new Gorillaz track out there (for free!), I generally expect something more unexpected from Converse.