Animal Collective – Bluish
2010 · Directed by Jason Oliver Goodman
13K Likes
Best comments
1.“It still blows my mind that it takes that many people to make a great video like this. I've had a piece of popcorn in my teeth for three hours, and me and one piece of dental floss can't figure this shit out.”
More comments
- 2.“I like how the things in the video are bluish.”
- 3.“Shoutout to my ex for ruining this song for me. EDIT: I've come to realize she didn't ruin it. She actually gave it so much more meaning than I understood.”
The story
Merriweather Post Pavilion is the record that carried Animal Collective out of the art-kid underground. It came out in January 2009, Pitchfork gave it a 9.6 and named it album of the year, Metacritic ranked it the best-reviewed album of 2009, and it reached number 13 on the Billboard 200. Bluish is track six, five minutes long, with Avey Tare singing lead. Under the Radar heard it as a sunny psychedelic pop tune from another planet.
The video showed up in September 2010, a year and a half after the album, streamed first on the band's own website. Director Jason Oliver Goodman, who goes by Goods, bathed it in blue light and double exposures, with belly dancing from Taryn Look and a whole lot of bubbles courtesy of bubble artist Chelsea Tran of the Gazillion Bubble Show. The Fader saw cat-eyed dancers camouflaged by stars and jumping-bean ghosts, and decided the whole thing was a picture of the big bang. Stereogum compared it to ODDSAC, the band's visual album that premiered at Sundance that same year.
Trippy, spooky and pretty, all at once. The right temperature for a song called Bluish.
