Have you ever hugged a trash bag? Never? Maybe this is not the review you want to read, because we are talking about trash bags and holding them. Or better said.. we are going to follow the person carrying a certain thrash bag. While the world is passing by like crazy, every day new things are keeping our minds occupied and our mouths in motion. Good music is needed to change the atmosphere of the strange times we are currently in.
The five-piece band UCURARIP released earlier this year their seventh EP, titled PLUS. Consisting of four tracks, the song SP.MOVE (you can read this as special move) received a music video a couple of weeks ago but still need to reach the 1000 views. Time to put it in the spotlight.
The video comprises of the right amount of mysterious abstractness and lets you guess what’s actually going on. While you are on the journey with the person carrying his spade and trash bag filled with unknown content, walking across the city while nobody gives him a weird look, you will also meet the other members of the band who are moving in reverse. They are all waiting for something or someone, hanging around in the city centre or at a station. The video shows them acting normally and the other people in the background in backwards movements. It is not directly noticeable, because the protagonist in the video is just moving forward normally, with difficulty, reminiscing the good and positive times of a certain relationship. But what happened with that relationship? Guesses can be made, while enjoying the mellow and fluffy tunes of UCURARIP.
The band describes themselves as genre-fluid, but get their inspiration from the music genres of the African diaspora, better known as black music, from soul to R&B. The theme the band uses with creating their songs and especially their songwriting is ‘beautiful subtraction’. Which means that they are focusing on refining accompaniment that will minimise overlapping tracks and developments. How they describe it on their website is: “The space created by subtraction creates the sense of incongruity in people’s minds, and it circulates in the body like poison.” It also results that the lyrics they produce will have a double-meaning.
The lyrics of the song goes hand-in-hand with the music video, singing about cleaning up a lot of things and a hopeless dark future. While the music video does feel light and you are taken on the adventure and waddle along, the content of it suddenly becomes much darker when the spade hits the ground.
The video itself was presented in a way that it gave of a cinematic feel, working hard to captivate the viewer to the point where they have to watch the whole video for the storyline or even rewatch to discover the elements that were missed in the first view.
In the meantime, the five-piece became officially a four-piece after the announcement of the bass player mat leaving the band due to personal reasons.
