The implication of visual effects in psychedelics is a perfect reason and/or backdrop for a music video. Brooklyn quartet BIRDS embraces this marriage of sight and sound, and purports something appropriately supernatural, in their video for “Scatter,” a new single off their forthcoming LP, Everything All At Once. Opening guitar strumming, weighted heavily with wah and distortion, sets the ball in motion, giving way to a poppy-yet-slamming rhythm section that, all together, blurs the room, or park, or subway car in which you sit, and your eyebrows turn into caterpillars and start walking off your face. There’s a warm feeling, a buzz that goes through you as verse and chorus shift footing from air-walking whimsy and swirling clouds of fuzz. Duane Lauginiger’s entranced and incensed vocals ground the whole thing, the actual, present voice in your head that reminds you to no end that you think, therefore you are, man. The accompanying images, directed by Josef Wakeman, are about as fitting as it gets. The camera goes from band member to band member, each with a sort of spaced-out look on their face, and everything moving and standing still at the same time. Ultra slow motion warps and VCR dissolves offer a retroactive feel and time is obsolete. But it does go on, and the thing’s over before you know it, before the three-minute mark, even. It’s a quick lil trip.
Everything All At Once is out August 18 on Greenway Records.
And hey, Brooklyn! BIRDS play Our Wicked Lady tonight (7/18) with Sun Abduction, Sic Tic, and White Lighters.
