Thursday 5 May 2011

Austra - Lose It (Video)

In every interview and tipster guide that we have read on new music blogging, one consistent doctrine comes across from every person who gives such guidance; establish your own voice. We’re still wrestling with this concept a little, even after music blogging for nearly three years, because surely every thought, every word we put down here, is our own voice?

Yes, sure there are blogs that just copy and paste press releases but the vast majority don’t and instead do what suits them. That may be just writing a few ‘cool’ and ‘arty’ words on a site with a funky design, or writing wordy Pitchfork-here-we-come journalistic essays, or simply posting a video with no commentary, or just banging a few words out about whatever comes into the author’s head and pressing post. There’s room for all types of blogs and there are no rules. Blogs are by and large written by just one or a handful of authors and therefore their style, their voice, their tastes, no matter how genre specific or all over the place, will come across. Of course some people will interpret ‘find your own voice’ as ‘be unique’ but the reality is this is very hard to do. There are so many blogs, so many voices, that to make yours stand out you have to be either a radical visionary or so way out there that the danger is nobody will actually want to hear that voice.

Today Austra unveiled the video for their single Lose It. It wins the award for strangest visuals of the week. We’ve already talked about the band and the song before. We’ve already mentioned that the song bears an odd similarity to the Lloyds TSB For The Journey advert. We’ve already thrown in some references about operatic Florence goes electronic. We’ve already got giddily excited. So today as we’re at a loss to explain this video, we find ourselves with absolutely no voice.

Failed blogger? No, because somehow we’ve managed to get 350+ words out about a video and said absolutely nothing, which in an odd way is a voice of its own.

We could have just posted the video and saved ourselves some time though couldn’t we?

No comments: