OK Go - Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky (2010)

OK Go's third album, Of the Blue Colour Of The Sky, was produced by Dave Friddman. Friddman has contributed elements of his "massive, expansive, 3-dimensional surreal beautiful world" (Spin interview) to the music of Mercury Rev, Mogwai, Elf Power, Phantom Planet, Low, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Tapes 'N Tapes, MGMT, Black Moth Super Rainbow, The Flaming Lips (since 1990), and now...OK Go. The sonic difference between this latest album and previous Oh No are heard right off the bat with "WTF?" (video for this track below). This is very dance-y Prince-influenced stuff replete with huge drums, heavy synths and reverb, captivating raspy vocals, and seriously catchy choruses. The album's name, lyrics, concept, and above cover art are based on The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Colour of the Sky, a pseudoscientific book published in 1876 that seems to study the relationship between color and theme (one of our goals as well). Read more about it here.

OK Go have put out some of the most creative and most watched music videos of modern times, with the treadmill-based "Here It Goes Again" racking up about 50 million views on YouTube. In the above-linked Spin interview, frontman Damian Kulash answers a question I feel many people ask-- Q:"In what way can a music video make a song better or worse?" A: "Oh boy. That's a really good question. I think a video works best when it gives the song an extra dimension as opposed to just illustrating the lyrics. When a video can hurt is when it seems like an advertisement for coolness, or the band, or ideas that are explicit in the song anyway. I'm shocked when people take a sad love song and then do a video that's a narrative treatment of a break-up. Those kinds of videos are almost implying that the song was a failure because it didn't communicate what the song was about. What we want to do with our videos is have a short burst of feeling; to give you a cool little world to live in for three minutes. That's what we're going for."

So again, here is the video for "WTF?" You can watch the pretty hilarious "the making of WTF?" here. A couple of more tracks can be streamed below.

OK Go - This Too Shall Pass
OK Go - White Knuckles

Wiki - YouTube - Last.fm - HypeM - MySpace - Facebook - Amazon