Video premiere: El Ten Eleven, ”˜The Sycophants Are Coming! The Sycophants Are Coming!’

Kevin Bronson on
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It isn’t hard to grasp the concept behind El Ten Eleven’s new Adam Hauck-directed video for “The Sycophants Are Coming! The Sycophants Are Coming!” – after a few years of slogging through the surf, the Los Angeles duo is finally and justifiably making waves with their fourth album “It’s Still Like a Secret.”

“Things have been going really well – we had some sold-out shows on the last tour,” says Kristian Dunn, who masterminds the twosome’s instrumental post-rock with Tim Fogarty. “We’re still small, but we’re starting to get bigger, and it feels like we’re coming out of the morass and reaching the top of the hill.”

The follow-up to 2008’s very good “These Promises Are Being Videotaped,” the new album refines the duo’s propulsive compositions – El Ten Eleven’s lyric-less excursions can be background music if you want, but Dunn’s guitar, carried as it is by Fogarty’s rhythms, speaks a language of its own. Besides, there are the whimsical song titles: “Tomorrow Is an Excuse for Today,” “Ian Mackaye Was Right” and “Marriage Is the New Going Steady” among them.

It’s cinematic music that isn’t necessarily visually inspired, Dunn says: “You’d think that’s the way my mind works, but to me that’s kind of a cart before the horse thing. Most of the time there’s no intention for our music to be a soundtrack for anything. The songs are usually about somebody or something, or they just come out when Tim and I are jamming in a room.”

Will El Ten Eleven ever make music with vocals? “We’re open to it,” Dunn says. “No one ever seems to have the guts to do it.”

||| Stream: “It’s Still Like a Secret” at the duo’s Bandcamp page.

||| Previously: “I Like Van Halen Because My Sister Says They’re Cool,” off 2008’s “These Promises Are Being Videotaped.”

||| Live: El Ten Eleven is scheduled to play an in-store at Origami Vinyl on Monday to celebrate the vinyl release of their album.