[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpfyNd4iNpU[/youtube]
There’s something undeniably gestational about Vancouver duo Blind Horses’ clip for “Mindy”, the first video from their debut full-length Avail. It could be in the figures’ crude rendering; their physical features are not fully formed, not where they should be, or missing altogether. Or it could be in the way figures appear to drift in an ambiguous, timeless space, many of them clustering together like fully germinated spores.
“Mindy” follows the trajectory of one of these anatomically incorrect figures, one that resembles a mannequin after the 2011 Stanley Cup Riot, before switching focus to something of a Ness character that the mannequin knocks out of the cluster’s orbit. Little Nessy reaches a final destination that, despite gridded, Tron-like planes, at last conveys some sense of gravity and real world weightiness as a swarm of black orbs breaches the new dimension and plummets until Little Ness is buried.
Conceivably with extended metaphors for “beginning”, “Mindy” is a fitting debut for Blind Horses, the coming out for a band that has spent the past few years painstakingly plying its craft. Some may scoff at the “poor” 3D design, but such primordial design works with the video’s sense of incubational stasis which further works with the song itself: the video is enigmatic; the smoky background is murky. Like the figures, particularly the one that gets buried in the virtual ball pit, listeners are forced to wade – through layers of reverb in order to distinguish Blind Horses’ lyrics. But when the music is this soothing and rich in texture, I, for one, am just as happy as the figures are to drift.
