How much can you pack into a two-minute song? Well according to On Video’s new single ‘He Is Me’ you can pack all your clothes (with plenty of spare pants and socks), a small generator, lots of power tools and a kitchen sink full of electric eels. And, if you’ve got a two-minute song you might as well build it around a mesmerising two-note riff performing a tango with a wood block. But the coup de grâce comes when the riff morphs into phalanx of full-throttle power chords like a piece of cod getting battered and fried along with bass (the instrument not the fish) and tight AF drums.
On Video are a four-piece band from East London and singer Hassan Anderson says of the song: “I wrote the opening line…long before we’d written the actual song. It was just a silly line that we found funny (‘When I bust through the door and I see you with him and I then realise that he is me’). I liked the ridiculousness of the phrase ‘he is me’ but instead of seeing it purely in jokey terms it set the tone for a kind of dream logic where the distinction between yourself and the other is no longer clear.“
‘He Is Me’ is a great example of songs that utilise light and dark: quiet passages that explode volcanically, like the faltering moments before a sneeze that eventually detonates in your nose so violently that fear it will be blown off. On Video sound like serious fun, and that a sense of humour combined with power chords has got me in an indie-swoon.
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Review by Paul F Cook
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