If you've never heard the bass throated (Smog) well you're missing on about ten years of awesome music. Bill Callahan, the brains behind the guitar, always writes lyrics that seem to have been slapped together with a forefinger and a dictionary. On several listens, though, you can't help but realize that this is not some two-bit poet with a bad sense of meter, but a strange, straight-laced sense of whimsey. It's fitting that he should be dating Joanna Newsom, the opposite end of the whimsey scale (Whimsical whimsey?) who, by the way, plays the piano on this song.

The video is perfectly animated with red and black animations over a sepia background. It gives the illusion of being created in some futuristic past where cartoons can fade in and out of clouds and long tendrilly eyeballs can peer at cowboys with guitars. Yet its simple elegance of emerging from and returning to a thumbprint of sorts give this video a feeling of cohesion.

Ten high-fives to anyone who can tell me what "645" stands for in the video. Also: ten more high-fives (for a total of 20) to anyone who can tell me how in the Hell they do that cloudy murk that flotsams each drawing away.

Oh, by the way, my name is Cap'n Guthrie, and this is my first post here. Thought I'd smash this bottle of YouTube champagne on your face to christen this new ship o' mine.

Bon voyage:

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Labels: arts and animation, cap'n guthrie, meshuggy, music video