OK Go 'Of the Blue Colour of the Sky' album

The mind-bending band that gave us what is largely considered the decade’s most viewed music video (even the Simpsons parodied it), the treadmill-manned “Here It Goes Again” is back. Never content to rest on their laurels, OK Go is preparing to tread anything but familiar territory with their upcoming new album, Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky releasing on January 12, 2010 on Capitol Records.

The 13-track opus is the long-awaited follow-up to their acclaimed Oh No, which spawned the 2007 Grammy-award-winning video hit “Here It Goes Again“ (setting numerous viewing records as it helped transform the then-fledgling YouTube into a household name).” Of the Blue Colour of the Sky is currently primed to kick off 2010 as one of the new year’s most buzzed-about releases. According to Kulash, the new album springs from a different departure point than previous OK Go releases. “It’s not so much that we headed in a new direction. I think we’ve just expended the guitar-rock ideas from our teens and we’re starting to get at more root-level influences. There’s a lot of Purple Rain on this record – an album I haven’t stopped listening to since I got it when I was eleven.”

Kulash added that record’s title comes from an 1876 book promoting the erroneous theory that blue light cures all ills. As fits a record influenced by Prince and crackpot 19th century arm-chair scientists, the record is both danceable and contemplative; it’s introspective, with a vein of surrealism running through it. There’s a song that considers the earth before it was round, one sung by a man who’s traded places with his reflection, and plenty of heartbreak and (attempts at) hope, mostly hung on a groovier backbone than we’ve heard from OK Go before. “We started these songs with a groove,” Damian says. “They started as base feelings, not chord progressions or lyrical ideas, and then we layered.” After 2005’s Oh No, recorded nearly live with minimal overdubs, and their swaggering 2008 EP You’re not Alone, backed by the trombone band Bonerama (a benefit for musicians displaced by hurricane Katrina), this new sound comes as something of a departure.

Funk-edged songs such as “Skyscrapers,” “All Is Lost,” “White Knuckles,” and the Prince-inspired, odd-time-signature hip shaker “WTF?” embody the album’s heady flow of adventurous undercurrents. “This album is the most layered production we’ve ever done,” says Damian. Produced by ex-Mercury Rev member David Fridmann (Flaming Lips, MGMT), Damian acknowledges that Fridmann’s singular production style and secluded studio environment in Fredonia, NY (‘you have to drive fifteen minutes for a cup of coffee’ he notes) added to the CDs emotive heft. “We were there to work, and for weeks on end it snowed and we just lived in the bubble with our songs.” Amazingly, the band’s original pool of song ideas numbered more than a hundred, with the group eventually narrowing the choices down to manageable double digits.

Kulash has also kept himself busy with an assortment of activist endeavors – he testified in support of internet neutrality before a Congressional Special Task Force. He and bandmate, Andy Ross, met with leaders on Capitol Hill in the spring of 2008 to advocate for the same. The band also met with then-candidate, Barack Obama, about the specter of access-limiting online practices, and other issues, with the group eventually appearing in ads in support of Obama. OK Go also took time from their non-stop touring regimen (31 consecutive months over five continents) to raise money in support of New Orleans’ music culture in the wake of Katrina. The band’s efforts with Bonerama raised more than half of the money for soul legend Al “Carnival Time” Johnson’s new home in New Orleans.

Damian and the rest of the band look forward to full-fan reaction to Of the Blue Colour of the Sky come January. “I think it sounds more like us than anything else we’ve done,” he says. “Its more like the music that’s in the back of my head, just out of reach, that I’ve been trying to get to for so long. And it embodies contradiction in a way I feel connected to. It’s both the saddest and the most hopeful music we’ve made, and both the danciest and most thoughtful.”

OK Go biography
Okay, let’s just get this part out of the way. Most people know OK Go from their videos,especially those treadmills. Any video that’s well enough known to be parodied on The Simpsons is a cultural force in itself and, checking the YouTube rating right before sitting down to write this, I was amazed to see that the number of views on the band’s YouTube page alone now stands at 47,788,229. That’s a lot. That many people and a brother who’s the Governor of Florida is pretty much enough to win you a presidential election. Add the zillions who've seen it elsewhere, and you might not even need the brother.

So if you’re reading these words, you’ve probably seen that video. I find even more endearing the video dance to “A Million Ways” that hundreds of amateur foursomes – kids and adults and church groups and school groups – have imitated in what certainly must be the world’s first international YouTube dance contest. If you haven't had the pleasure, Google it right now and prepare to lose two hours of your life.

But I am here to say that OK Go is more than those videos. The band’s frontman Damian Kulash sometimes makes big declarations like “We're trying to be a DIY band in a post-major label world” or “Our whole bag is having good ideas and making cool shit.”

I find that convincing.

Some of the other cool shit they’ve made lately: a record accompanied only by trombones, a play, an essay in the best-selling collection Things I’ve Learned From Women Who Dumped Me, op-eds in the New York Times and Huffington Post. They’ve testified before Congress and played in the Senate chambers. I repeat: they played music in the chambers of the United States Senate. They’ve been commentators on All Things Considered. They interviewed a member of N’Sync in the bathroom of Radio City Music Hall. They have a project where they walk the streets with fans handing out burritos to the homeless. They raised most of the money to buy a house for soul legend Al Johnson, so he could move home to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

All these extracurriculars make a great story, and this is the story that gets the space in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today: OK Go is the polymath band who – with only five bucks and a camcorder – did what none of the giant record labels could, inventing a new way for a band to connect with fans and changing the way people think about music and the Internet. Great story, though it overlooks the most important thing about the band: its music. What makes OK Go great is that they write and perform great songs.

With this new record they seem determined not to let us forget it. Of the Blue Colour of the Sky is adventurously, emphatically musical – intricate, emotional, completely self-assured while it stakes out new musical territory. The ear-worm catchiness of their earlier records is still there, but the writing is more focused and sure-footed and the guitar sound broader and moredimensional.

The album’s named after an 1876 book about the healing power of blue light (is it necessary to point out here that blue light has no such power?) and the lyrics are mostly about brave attempts at hope in the face of hopeless situations, which makes it fantastically upbeat and also very sad. The album’s last line sums it up: “Every day is the same, we’re praying for rain.”

That said, it’s mostly a dance record. Way more Prince than Leonard Cohen. Apparently some really sad stuff is happening in the guys’ personal lives – perhaps fueled by their ridiculous 31- month stint on the road, away from loved ones – and the way they’re expressing it is with infectious melodies, a sense of rhythm I can only describe as much feelier than before, and lyrics that seem either cheerful or trying-desperately-to-be-cheerful, depending on your frame of mind. The rule of thumb in pop music that great records come after heartbreak seems to be at work here in spades. Damian sings mournfully in the barest moment on the album, “Can’t you love me?” and even the upbeat songs are about love collapsing. “I’ve been trying to get my head round what the fuck is happening?” goes one of the catchiest hooks. “I’m trying to make some sense out of what you’re doing with my head.”

I listened obsessively for a couple weeks, and my favorite song – the one that would stick in my brain – kept shifting, which says good things. Right now it’s “Back From Kathmandu.” I love how forcefully and confidently and slowly it goes about its business, with a yearning pop melody, scraggly loose guitars over a loud slow beat and that “is it cheerful or is it sad?” thing in spades. Dreamy verses lead to noisy, boisterous choruses about the power of love. What else could you want from a pop song?

This is supposed to be a bio, so here are some of the abc’s of OK Go: Damian Kulash (vocals, guitar) and Tim Nordwind (bass) met at summer camp when they were eleven and promptly formed a band called The Greased Ferrets that featured folding chairs played as drums. They claim not to remember any of the songs they wrote at the time. “Claim” would be the key word in that sentence. They met Dan Konopka (drums) in college, but somehow didn't form into OK Go until 1999, even though they all believed someday they'd have a band together. Figure. Andy Ross (guitar, keys) joined in 2005 after he met them through college pals.

A few years ago, OK Go performed at some live shows our radio program This American Life was doing onstage across the country. They were like human catnip. We had huge crowds and people of every age—high school sophomores to senior citizens—just LOVED them. The band simply overwhelmed the audience with this exuberant buzz of fun and happiness and youth and rock 'n roll. They were sexy in a way that had a kind of well-scrubbed pop innocence to it, but that also moved a friend to murmur backstage, "I want to fuck all four of them.”

Judging from the crowds at their shows these days, the reaction hasn’t changed much. They’ve been doing their thing – making cool shit – and thanks to the videos, that exuberant buzz has spilled across the globe. But don’t let that distract you, the best part of OK Go is still the music.

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OK Go - Of the Blue Colour of the Sky