Snarky Puppy’s eye-popping new animated video is a surreal visual adventure
22 February 2019
Newsdesk
Inspired by films like Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, Ralph Bakshi’s American Pop and Disney’s 1937 classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the surreal video for Snarky Puppy’s ’Bad Kids To The Back’ utilizes rotoscoped visuals to turn an in-studio performance into one of the wildest animated videos you will see this year. Animator/co-director Michaël Alcaras drew frame-by-frame over live footage of the band recording the song in studio (shot by the video’s other co-director, Stella K), and turned it into an eye-popping four minutes and forty-five seconds. The Snarky horn section suddenly have animal heads; band members shoot lasers from their eyes and tall buildings dance along to the song’s hypnotic grooves. ‘Bad Kids to the Back’, a “crisp, strutting” (Rolling Stone) track written by Snarky Puppy member Justin Stanton, comes from the group’s upcoming album Immigrance, out March 15th on GroundUP Music.
Speaking about the video Michael League said “In an obvious departure from the live-in-the-studio video format we've used for so many years, we asked the great French animator Michaël Alcaras to cook up something weird for us. Using studio footage from the Immigrance sessions on the Texas/Mexico border at Sonic Ranch Studios (shot by Stella K), I'd say he succeeded. Special shout out to rollerblades, eyeball lasers, drum trades, Kubrick, and cows in space.”
A touring dynamo who have played to thousands of fans at shows on six continents, Snarky Puppy will embark on another ambitious world tour in 2019. This weekend, the band will be accompanied by the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles before officially kicking off the 68-date world tour April 11th in Osaka, Japan. The tour will currently hit 19 countries, with UK dates to be announced on February 26th.
The follow-up to 2016’s GRAMMY-winning Culcha Vulcha, Immigrance is a studio project, and it features most of the same musicians. And though it shares that project’s ace musicianship and dynamic, kinetic spirit, it is also rawer and moodier than its predecessor. Several of the compositions put a newfound emphasis on delivering simpler, streamlined impact and bassist, composer and bandleader Michael League, as producer of the album, left in the tiny flubs and unvarnished textures that accompany great organic performances.
The New York Times praised “Xavi,” the first single from Immigrance, saying “Snarky Puppy might be today’s most popular band whose audience wouldn’t be fazed by a nearly 10-minute-long lead single with no words…Crunchy guitar slices out a truncated phrase in conversation with an insistent snare drum, and flutes and trumpets drape a humid cloud cover overhead.”
