Rural Alberta Advantage: Drowning for Fun and Profit
We get a lot of great music videos from Mick Cullen over at Subterranean Radio because Cullen has the best nose for tracking down incredible underground music in the country. His latest offering to us is a Canadian band called the Rural Alberta Advantage and the video for their song "Muscle Relaxants."
The song itself is an incredibly upbeat indie rock offering. If you gave Bob Dylan an unwise amount of laughing gas then this is the song we would probably turn. It's delightfully jinglingly, and even has a decent dance beat if movement is your thing.
But it's the video that really stands above the crowd, and we haven't seen the like of it from anything less than a major mainstream act
Filmed in a beautiful black and white, we follow the group as the cavort through underwater photography that is half Dicovery Channel, half elegant ballet. A collage of ecstatic writhing bodies bearing grins of pure joy meshes with the constant rain of musical instruments into the depths of what appears to be a very deep, very black body of water.
That's the triumph of the cinematography in "Muscle Relaxants." Each shot is framed perfectly to let the viewer recognize the enormity of the underwater setting, and even on our tiny laptop screen we can't help but feel an almost endless abyss beneath the lightly kicking feet of the band as they swim.
Every moment we expect to see the Loch Ness Monster meander on by, dodging the outflung limbs and gently falling tambourines. The wonderful, optimistic catchiness of the song and the sheer simple brilliance of the video make anything possible. Check it out below.
We fired off some emails to Rural Alberta Advantage to ask them a bit about how such a great piece of work came about. Continue to page 2 to read it.
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