Tag Archives: Of Monsters and Men

My Head is an Animal lyric videos

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Directorial team WeWereMonkeys has been creating lyric videos for all the songs from Of Monsters and Men’s debut album.  I particularly like this one, with the silhouettes of giants in the distance; it’s like something from a video game:

I think the dark misty mysterious fantastical look that WeWereMonkeys create (for these lyric videos and the older official music videos) fit the band’s sound really well.  I don’t know why their album cover features a random person in funny-looking shorts on the beach, or what’s up with all the pink.  Bubble-gum pink CDs and vinyls?  These are songs with bones and monsters and mountains and creatures.  What about their sound made some art designer think, “Ah, yes, pink!  Clearly pink!”  Even the band’s most popular song, Little Talks… that’s a dark, tragic song.  “You’re gone, gone, gone away, I watched you disappear.  All that’s left is a ghost of you.”  Someone’s losing her mind in that song, fading from existence.  There’s nothing pink there.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the lyric video for Your Bones, my favorite song.

Of Monsters and Men: Your Bones

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I’m usually listening to orchestral music, but this song has been stuck in my head a lot lately. The melody is almost pentatonic (think Fiona’s theme from Shrek), but then it dips down to the subdominant, adding an additional note for a hexatonic melody, a basic major scale that just avoids the subtonic. But I think what makes it catchy is that it sounds like it shifts between two pentatonic scales, one based on the tonic, the other on the subdominant. And the chords emphasize these shifts; they sound like just vi-I-IV progressions (submediant, tonic, subdominant). Very simple. (I’m not sure how accurate all that music theory is; I haven’t closely analyzed it, and I’m not a brilliant music theorist anyway. But that’s what it sounds like.)

The band’s song “Little Talks” subconsciously dug it’s way into my head after hearing it repeatedly on the radio. So I explored more of their songs on Spotify, and found most of them to be just as catchy. The lyrics are also more imaginative. They seem to have a spirit of Scandinavian mythology about them, what with bones and mountains and forests and animals with spiritual connotations.

Maybe I’ll pick up the album on which the song appears, My Head Is an Animal, when I buy the deluxe edition of the Les Miserables soundtrack when it comes out later this month.