OK Go, the band whose inventive self-directed music videos have set internet records and won the band a GRAMMY, will unveil their latest crazily ambitious clip – the second video for current single “This Too Shall Pass” – on Monday, March 1st at www.okgo.net. Before shooting commenced last week, the band spent four months working with SynnLabs, a team of creative engineers with day jobs at NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to build a two-story Rube Goldberg machine in a Los Angeles warehouse. Goldberg, a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist and inventor, was best known for his cartoons of imaginary devices – now known as Rube Goldberg machines – performing simple tasks in an elaborate, convoluted manner. Fans can check out highlights from the making of the video at Absolute Punk and Rolling Stone and over the next week at Shock Hound and other sites for different clips. On Monday, March 1, each of these partner sites will post a blooper video that allows fans to “trigger” themselves to OK Go’s site (www.okgo.net) for the premiere. Of course, once at the band’s site there will be more fun and games too.
The Los Angeles Times’ “Pop & Hiss” blog was on hand last week as OK Go shot “This Too Shall Pass:”
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2010/02/a-walk-through-ok-gos-new-video-death-machine.html
The video features the album/single version of “This Too Shall Pass,” and follows up on the explosive success of their last video, a live recording of the same song that featured 130 members of the Notre Dame marching band. That clip marked the first time that a song’s video and recording session were one and the same, and in only a couple weeks its online views have soared past two million. It can be seen on MTV2, mtvU, Nickelodeon, Teen Nick, Fuse.Tv (where it was recently “Video of the Day”), Logo and Music Choice.
State Farm’s sponsorship of the new Rube Goldberg video is helping OK Go be there for their fans: it will be embeddable by fans and can be posted anywhere on the internet. A furor erupted last month because fans could not embed earlier OK Go videos due to contractual issues. When singer Damian Kulash posted a candid and even-handed explanation of the situation to fans (http://okgo.forumsunlimited.com/index.php?showtopic=4169), his letter itself went viral, netting over 500,000 hits in two days.
“This Too Shall Pass” has also had early success at Modern Rock radio and impacts the format on February 23rd.
OK Go will appear on Fuel TV’s “The Daily Habit” on February 18th and has been tapped as Xbox LIVE’s “Artist of the Month” for March, facing off with fans in a Game With Fame event. The band will perform on the outdoor stage of “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on April 1st, prior to the launch of its upcoming North American tour. Dates for the tour, which will include stops at Bamboozle and Bonnaroo, will be announced shortly.
With 175 million video streams and counting, OK Go – comprising Damian Kulash, Tim Nordwind, Dan Konopka and Andy Ross – is the most-downloaded band ever. Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky, the group’s new album, is the follow-up to 2005’s Oh No and was produced by ex-Mercury Rev member David Fridmann (Flaming Lips, MGMT). The record earned a 4 ½ star review from Alternative Press, prompting the critic to “start drafting that ‘Best of 2010’ list, right now” while Spin praised it as “ambitious,” comparing the rhythm section to a “stealth weapon…they explode with the force of a polyrhythmic fireworks display.”