I spent yesterday afternoon binge watching music videos from one my favourite bands: the Dodos, Meric Long and Logan Kroeber’s West Coast duo.
I somehow missed their amazing collaborations with Stargaze orchestra.
The orchestra brings gorgeous depth to “Transformer” from their 2013 album, Carrier. They performed two other tracks, “Relief” and “Death” and are a joy to watch.
For comparison, this is what the original video for Transformer looks and sounds like (the animated short is a bit dark):
The first time I came across The Dodos was from also from a music video—“Fools” from 2008’s Visiter—choreographed to Danny MacAskill’s run through Gran Canaria in the Canaries. I could watch this all day:https://www.youtube.com/embed/GL0rbxB9Lqg
I got addicted to the band’s sound. When this happens, I go through phases where I listen to tracks or bands in loops, and this “Fools” was on heavy rotation for a few weeks, which then led to rotating albums for months, putting extra weight on Spotify’s recommendations.
One of my favourite music videos is this one.
Apparently it took Logan and Meric three months to train for this. There’s a part in their performance with Seattle’s KEXP where they share some comments behind the video’s creation with Cheryl Waters (at 12:52).
I love that KEXP makes such high production studio recordings of music available for free to watch… it just brings a level of intimacy and personality to the music you don’t get with album tracks.
It’s fun to stumble upon band stories through these studio videos. In this performance with Audiotree, Logan talked about the SW3 music video (below) coming about after asking a colleague if his daughter would perform martial arts for the video, which turned out exceedingly well.
I’m already looking forward to their new album, “Grizzly Peak”, coming out 12 Nov. They’ve already released a few tracks as Lyric videos on YouTube, like this reworked track from the EP “The Surface”.
