Music Post: Gotye and Kimbra

I may not comment often, but I pretty much always read drwex's music posts. Today caulay shared an ear worm with me and I was already in an analytical mood, so I'm inspired to do a Wex-ish style music post. 

He pointed me to the video for Gotye's Somebody I Used To Know, which starts off so innocuously, I didn't expect it to go anywhere as such in any aspect. Gotye's style reminds me a great deal of Peter Gabriel**, who is someone I've always liked in passing, but to date have never made any effort to buy his stuff. Then the background starts changing, and I'm getting more sucked in. The music is still OK, but I'm not paying that much attention to the lyrics. Oh. Now we are painting on people to make them match the background? Ah. In the last third we finally get to Kimbra. Woah. Hello, nurse. Great voice, great body. Somewhere within the first few bars of their duet, I realize I'm going to have to backtrack and rewatch all of it. Which I do. 

Now I am inspired to hear what Kimbra sounds like on her own, so I go down a few rabbit holes in YouTube until I get to her video for Good Intent. Again, I don't start off really paying a lot of attention. Then there's dancing and imagery and symbolism, and I go back. I adore the 3 aspects of self, the use of color, the throw back to Mad Men-era 60s, the dancing! So, if you choose to watch the video, you may as well plan on really really watching it. Don't try to multi-task. You may want to leave time to watch it two times to catch the stuff you didn't see the first time. 

Ideally, I should find a solo song by Gotye to complete the circuit, but I've already lost a lot of time to these three (if you include Excellent Birds, listed below) and theoretically should do something less procrastinaty with my time. I do have every expectation of purchasing Good Intent, although in reality I'll probably 'Used to Know, too, since it's already stuck in my head as it is. 

**My first exposure to him doing Excellent Birds with Laurie Anderson. I didn't know at the time who Gabriel was. Maybe not so unusually, it was Laurie Anderson who was played at my house. However, that specific song was on my father's very first CD, which was a compilation that may well have come with our first CD player. That disk also had Chaka Kahn, Don Henley's Boys of Summer, and Wang Chung's Dance Hall Days. Getting back to the video I found for Excellent Birds: talk about a trip back in a time machine, and yet, whenever I think of either Anderson or Gabriel they are that age in my mind. It's jarring as hell to see that they are not those people anymore.