The newest release from Dan Snaith is sad, compelling and ethereal. Listen to the song and watch the video here.
Caribou’s song “Our Love” sounds like it should be played at 5 a.m. in a winding-down rave at an abandoned warehouse. Perhaps that’s why director Ryan Staake decided to do the opposite in his music video.
The youthfulness of the track is a stark contrast to its latest video. The last thing most of us think of when we listen to Caribou is growing old and dying. This is exactly what Staake evokes in “Our Love.”
The song is nearly entirely instrumental, as most Caribou songs tend to be. Its pulsating synths and beats keep a steady rhythm as the video unfolds. The pairing of the music with the video is creepy and unnerving, but strangely pleasant at the same time.
The director could have taken a more literal approach to the song. When you close your eyes and let the music take you, what comes to mind is the gyrating hips of hundreds of bodies dancing along to the beat. The music is catered to house music culture, but you wouldn’t know it looking at the video.
The video raises “Our Love” above the sometimes vapid dance video genre. It begins with an old woman dressed in all white sitting on a stair escalator in a huge, beautiful home. We watch her rise to the top of the staircase and enter her bedroom. She places a necklace against her collarbone and lovingly smooths the blankets on her bed, where a body draped in a white sheet lies.
She slowly makes her way through the rest of the house and into a forest by a lake. The video flashes back to a scene of two young lovers embracing under a string of lights at the lake’s edge. The old woman reaches the same lake’s edge and walks toward the water.
Where the song itself lacks a storytelling element, the director of “Our Love” creates a world based on Caribou’s sounds. By the end of the video, what originally sounded disturbing and clashed together begins to sound as if the two should always have been combined.
The song “Our Love” suddenly evokes a sense of impermanence and mortality. One minute we are standing in the moonlight with the one we love, and the next moment they are gone. It’s a powerful video.
“Our Love” is the cornerstone of Caribou’s latest record of the same name. In addition to this haunting, echoing new track, Caribou already has remix of the song out right now.
Take a look at the latest version of Caribou’s work below:
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