Heads & Tails Single Video Review

A devil and an angel, one wonders as the black, devil tailed chap approaches the white, anthropomorphic bird dude.  A tussle ensues and these enemies become a rotating yin-yang. After a revolution the yin-yang separates out again, and now our two protagonists are inverted, the black white and the white black.

No, I’m not talking about another lucid dream. This is the intro to the video for number two on the Kiwi FM Top Ten last week, 2 a.m. Orchestra’s new track Heads & Tails.

The intro is the tamest part. There are things falling into all kinds of holes, things morphing from one thing to another, often times it’s our devil friend and the angel chap turning into each other or intertwining again.

There’s the esoteric, hermetic, even Christian symbology, and sometimes it’s hard to determine to what extent the symbols are symbolic or whether these frantic morphings are the lunatic scribblings of an eccentric genius.

Did I mention the video was entirely hand drawn? And not especially well, a judgement I made on my first viewing.  But in successive viewings I’ve changed my stance. I’ve seen past the scribble lines and fathomed the meaning behind them.

Think too, before judging, the seemly impossible task of hand drawing all those pictures using a mouse and what looks like Microsoft Paint. We’re talking 12 drawings per second, sixty seconds in a minute, three minutes and fifty seconds of music video. I’m no mathmagician, but that’s… a lot of… oh… wait… I have a calculator on my computer… who knew.

Right. 12*((60*3)+50)=more hand drawn pictures than I have words in this review. Close to ten times more, all done by 2 a.m. Orchestra mastermind, David Kelley. And the work paid off; the Heads & Tails video is floating all over the internet now and reaching nearly 13,000 views on Youtube. If you haven’t seen it, you can find it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq0kfg_aGLM

The music is very Radiohead, though still in the confines of Rock, and not deviating into the wilderness of post-Rock. Kelley’s voice is melodic, haunting, cracking into falsetto at the perfect moments, like someone who has spent a lot of time learning from Thom Yorke.

I’ll be reviewing the music in more detail when 2am Orchestra release their highly anticipated new album, Working to Divide, which you can preview here: http://youtu.be/0HAenYamrgk