It’s Silly Conceptual Videos Tuesday!

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[5.75]

Sabina Tang: Amiably shaggy indie-house: the piano sample supplies forward propulsion but the voices hang back, cooing and shouting about how bloody difficult it is to get the craft moving. Miike Snow wisely call a stop before running out of gas.
[7]

John Seroff: Disposable pop gets a bad rap and though this is eminently disposable, that’s not a knock.  For the hefty handful of listenings that it survives, the luster is rich enough… though I think I liked this better when I read the chorus as “Cunnilingus.”  Either way the subject is a little man in a canoe.
[7]

Anthony Easton: I don’t know how paddling out works for surfing, but for canoeing, it requires a inital hard push, and then a set of small and quite delicate gestures, followed by pretty rapid adjustments. There is no rapid adjustment here. 
[6]

Andrew Ryce: There’s a few seconds on the chorus where it sounds like Hall & Oates for a fleeting moment. But it’s not. And it never will be. Instead, it’s generic white-boy electro-soul. And it always will be.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: Fine use of build, of sonics, of twitchy, bloodless funk. But even though you get used to the voice, that doesn’t make it good.
[5]

Brad Shoup: “There is someone here who laughs too hard at everything”: just the kind of accusatory party-pooping the Dan would indulge in. (Had it occurred to them, I’m certain Walter & Don would have demanded a bari sax part that sounded like a synth, and thus driven Ronnie Cuber mad.) So it’s settled: I’m in. Beautiful nonsense all, but I’m particularly pleased to carry “you/say/isn’t it hard?/paddling OWT/paddling OWT‘” with me for the rest of my coherent days, and to never hear Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move” without gonzo accompaniment.
[10]

Alfred Soto: Is that a Carole King piano part? At any rate I anticipated a house banger but instead got a singer whose idea of projection involves distorting and contorting a Chris Martin impersonation. I don’t understand thinking of an imaginative title metaphor and not doing a thing with it — unless Snow meant to describe how the producers left him lost at sea.
[2]

Iain Mew: Every time I listen to “Paddling Out” I enjoy its groove and various tricks, but there is nothing much there in the way of song to back them up. It is an empty vessel. Maybe that’s why there are no paddles.
[5]