In addition to its special brand of upbeat pop music, OK Go’s big claim-to-fame has to be single-handedly keeping the wacky music video industry afloat. Michel Gondry and The White Stripes don’t play with Lego bricks these days and Christopher Walken doesn’t dance to Fatboy Slim anymore, so the responsibility of keeping all of the people who film those things employed has to fall on OK Go’s kooky shoulders.
For the band’s latest video, promoting the song “The Writing’s On The Wall,” OK Go has ditched the treadmills and Rube Goldberg machines in favor of forced perspective tricks and brain-melting optical illusions. We’d hate to spoil a music video, but we’ll say the least crazy thing about it is a guy with only half of a beard, though that does raise a lot of questions on its own. Is the whole beard fake and he just removes half of it? Did he shave half of his beard during the filming? Is half of the beard real and he just removed the fake half? It’s a surprising amount of effort to put into one weird shot in a video full of weird shots, but that’s how you know it’s an OK Go original. We just hope the whole half-beard look takes off. It’s going to make shaving a lot easier.
The video was made as an early teaser for OK Go’s next album, Hungry Ghosts, which comes out on October 14.