This video for The Dodos new song, “Fools,” brings to mind subtle advances in what — just a few years ago — seemed like aesthetic + technological breakthroughs. In the song itself, the band take the sound Animal Collective pioneered with Sung Tungs (heedless, avant-garde, equally indebted to ecstatic devotional music as it was to indie rock) and they imbue it with a friendly, indie pop-music sheen.

The video file itself takes the media revolutions introduced by YouTube (embeds, convenience, instant loading & playback) and turns up the resolution several notches. I grabbed this video from the recently unveiled Pitchfork.tv. Maybe the online video experience will one day serve up real eye candy like this rather than the current standard experience, which is fuzzy, pixelated, and not-as-good as television. It's akin to being offered a buffet of food (soup, cake, etc), and then being told you can only eat it with chopsticks.

BTW, while all the reasons I've just enumerated contribute to my critical interest in this song, when it comes down to it, I just like it because it moves, it moves, and it never never stops…

After the jump, the YouTube version of the same video. Eat that cake with chopsticks bitchez!

Watching the YouTube and Pitchfork.tv versions of this video side-by-side, I'm noticing a few other things. For one, the 'fork don't even try to brand their vids with a Pitchfork.tv chyron in the lower left or right hand corner, a standard practice long familiar to viewers of MTV (when they actually played videos), and YouTube embeds (their annoyingly ubiquitous television logo). Click on the 'fork version of video as much as you'd like, and it won't even take you to the Pitchfork.tv site — completely dissociating the content from the site hosting it. It's as if they're offering this video up for almost altruistic reasons. (Really, it's probably just a matter of the Pitchfork.tv site being in “beta.”)

Finally, I'm finding that the Pitchfork.tv version is choking up constantly. Maybe by virtue of my internet connection? Could be, but it also could be revealing that eating a buffet with chopsticks isn't so bad after all.

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