It’s fitting that Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s stand out single from Multi-Love – proclaimed this year’s “Get Lucky, if Get Lucky was made by three acid-spangled guys with illuminati tattoos and tribal necklaces with a thing for Syd Barrett records” – receives an equally abstract and eerie music video.
For those uninitiated, Can’t Keep Checking My Phone is the swampy, psychedelic disco track that’s permeated from burger vans throughout festival fields in every continent this summer. Its new video, directed by Dimitri Basil and Cooper Roussel (with art direction by Laura Gorun and Dominique Basil) seams together fragments of sci-fi art house cinema, seemingly dusted off from future and bygone decades, referencing surreal physical phenomena such as malignant hum, Stendhal syndrome and virtual gender dysphoria.
“Can’t Keep Checking My Phone is so full of sounds and its lyrics are so elusive so I decided that one idea wouldn’t do the track justice,” said Basil. “My approach was to present the multiple ideas as if they were a trading card deck. Trading cards, like Mars Attacks, have a short description accompanied by illustrations. In this case the deck is about strange occurrences, syndromes or phenomena.”
Still confused? Watch the video below and continue the bewilderment.
- Unknown Mortal Orchestra tour throughout autumn. Their album, Multi-Love, is out now on Jagjaguwar.
