There are certain odd creative pairings that make total sense once they’ve worked together—think Danny DeVito and the cast of It’s Always Sunny, or Adam Sandler and Kevin Garnett, or anyone 100 gecs has gotten involved with over the past year or so. Similarly, in a sense, Soul Coughing’s Mike Doughty and Dicktown co-creator and co-star David Rees seemed destined to find each other, both channeling a very specific type of weird within their respective mediums.
After working together on a project last year, Doughty has tapped Rees and co-director Corey Dome to helm the latest video leading up to the release of his debut album as Ghost of Vroom. “I’m a huge David Rees fan—he is a samurai of modern absurdity,” Doughty shares. “I’m aiming for that with the lyrics, which is meant to be a confabulation of verbal sonics, language looping back and glitching on itself. So I think we’re a real love match artistically.”
The video certainly achieves this level of absurdity, blending weirdo animation, nature-doc scenery, and dancing chipmunks in a way that only really makes sense when attached to Doughty’s surrealist word association. “What struck us most about this song were the lyrics,” Rees notes. “They felt like cartoon dialogue from a dream. So we tried to make a lo-fi dreamscape for the band to play in, complete with an attention-seeking skull-snake and a hot air balloon ride—which all good dreams should have.”
Watch the video below, and expect Ghost of Vroom 1 out March 19 via Mod y Vi Records.
