Video: Bodies of Water, ‘Every Little Bird’

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Bodies of Water

Bodies of Water captured L.A.’s fancy with their collectivist energy and broad musical palette some 15 years ago. Their widely praised, self-released debut album “Ears Will Pop & Eyes Will Blink” eventually got picked up by Secretly Canadian in 2007, and the band has made three albums since.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge, especially for the core duo, husband-and-wife team David and Meredith Metcalf. They lead the band’s forays into soul- and gospel-inflected indie-rock and orchestral pop, but after their 2017 album “Spear in the City,” Bodies of Waters’ ranks were thinned as various collaborators moved away from L.A.

Now, founding member Kyle Gladden has come back, joining Alice Lin and the Metcalfs to make the fifth Bodies of Water album, “Is This What It’s Like,” due Feb. 12.

There is much subtext in the album’s titular question. “It took a while to make this record, mainly because we were waylaid time and again by everything: surprise deaths, children with disease, hospital panic, all of it,” David Metcalf says. Included: A miscarriage, Meredith’s severe morning sickness, open-heart surgery and the birth of a child a month before the pandemic.

Yet the album begins with a buoyant song about transformation, “Every Little Bird,” which hints at musical soil Metcalf is tilling on the record. “When I was writing these songs,” he says, “I was listening to two kinds of music a lot: Arabic pop music (mostly Lebanese and Egyptian) from the ’60s and ’70s (when electric instruments and idiomatic rock stuff was starting to be incorporated into groups), and American and European music from the ’50s and ’60s that wasn’t rock ’n’ roll. Music [that] adults were listening to: Shirley Bassey, Jacques Brel, Mina, Nina Simone, Nat King Cole, etc. Especially recordings that Conrad Salinger, Angela Morley and Ray Conniff worked on.”

The long-form video for “Every Little Bird” (the short version is here) features David Metcalf getting a bad haircut courtesy of his son, who then paints his face in preparation for a job interview. Bodies of Water followers may remember Metcalf’s strange job interview in 2015’s “Rise Up, Careful” video. Suffice to say this one is absolutely, positively more bizarre.

||| Watch: The video for “Every Little Bird”

||| Previously: “Dark Water”