British indie pop band Cornershop shared a new video for their song “I’m A Wooden Soldier.” The track is off England Is Garden, their first rock album in eight years, which came out this March.
It starts out with a hard rock guitar riff, joined by a simple rhythm section. Guitars jam out a bit on the riff and get noisier as the track progresses. The lyrics are centered around the hook, repetitively singing the title of the song with the occasional rhyme with ‘soldier’ thrown in to change it up. Beyond the repeated melody, the other lyrics make it clear that it’s a protest song, “Quick marching to the drum/Forward is the road/I’m a wooden soldier/Coming forth with which to deal ya/And the victory’s in the peace, not war, yeah.”
Astrid Edwards conceived, produced, animated and edited the music video on their own. It’s largely paper cutout animation with some video footage thrown in of phrases being written on a whiteboard, British soldiers marching in place and some other shorter clips. The colors largely stick to black, white and red to fit in with the old photographs, newspaper clippings and protest theme.
“It’s a Trojan horse of a song,” frontman Tjinder Singh explained to Brooklyn Vegan. “Images of wooden soldiers are playful and harmless but you are suddenly bombarded with real political issues, colonialism, parked elephants, and reclaiming looted uniforms. ‘Victory is in peace not war.’ Astrid took a very punk view on the song because of its guitar lines, and played with cut-ups and pre-existing photography and fast moving imagery to put the song back in 70s Britain, to bring out the Bolan boogie of the song.”
England Is a Garden is Cornershop’s eight studio album, all counted. The band’s previous record was Hold On It’s Easy, a 2015 throwback to the classic easy listening style. The one before that was a dance-inspired album, Urban Turban: The Singhles Club, in 2012.
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