Dan Snaith's music
(previously as Manitoba and now, Caribou) is some of the best bright
and sunny pop to roll out of speakers in recent years, and this video
collection on DVD accents that fact with mostly silly, cartoonish
visualizations of Snaith's blissful tunes.
Leaf
The videos for Marino are all made up from the kinds of simple, no
budget tricks and ideas that anyone who's ever wanted to make their own
music video with mom and dad's camcorder can pull together. One clip
uses a simple chroma key effect and footage shot out the window of a
moving vehicle to turn the oft-used "let's film out the window of the
van" technique into something psychadelic, while another uses a very
crude type of photoshop rotoscoping over digital video to turn people
into cartoons.
There's a running joke in the fan film community (that's the groups of
comic book and sci-fi devotees who film their own sequels to Star Wars and Batman
with portly friends and cheap 3D effects, for those not familiar with
such obsessions) that says that every fan film script opens with
something like: Ext.: The woods behind Jim's parents' house and
that approach is used here too, with characters wearing giant balloon
heads with hand-animated faces for expression running about through the
woods. Yet another video turns to puppets and technicolor freak outs in
a kind of trippy parody of a saturday morning kids' show. All in all,
the visual content is always colorful and appropriate accompaniment for
Caribou's music.
However, most of the videos lack anything resembling a narrative, and
the ones that do have some loose story are composed of simple arcs that
don't need three to five minutes to develop. I found myself drifting in
and out of paying attention to most of these clips, despite the fact
that I loved the crude, home-made charm of their presentation. And I
love the music here; the music is the strongest part of this collection
(which also comes with an audio CD containing four tracks). The videos
though tend to have the kind of conceptual momentum that runs out of
steam after a minute or two, which left me reaching for the remote so
that I could check out the next idea/gimmick and then move on.
I imagine that these vidoes would provide terrific backdrop for a
Caribou live show, since visuals in a show setting don't necessarily
have to hold the viewer's attention the way they do when someone is
watching a DVD at home. If nothing else, everything on the disc is cute
and well worth a spin, and the disc should provide ample inspiration
for those looking to grab a camcorder and some animation freeware to
make videos at home. I think that I'd rather have seen more time spent
on a few tracks than thin ideas applied to so many tracks as they are
here, but in the end, it's hard to hate on a disc with puppets bouncing
to Caribou.
Caribou, "Marino"
- Written by: Matthew Jeanes
- Parent Category: Reviews
- Category: Home Theater
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