Metronomy- The Bay







Metronomy’s album ‘the English Riviera’ included the song ‘The Bay’ there is a strong theme of summer and holiday that can be seen in both the album and the song. This is reflected in the video to ‘The Bay’ as it carries such themes strongly. The video is very artistic, it takes a modern twist on the usual video that would include these themes, it is performance based but uses many unique editing techniques and clever choreography to convey the lyrics and beat of the song.

There are very questionable camera angles and set ups used in the video, the shots look very strange as they are very unconventional. One shot consists of the band laying down on the decking of a pier amongst many bikini clad women, these women appear throughout the music video as background dancers and models. They are used very effectively and completely differently to a way in which bikini models would be in any other video.

There is a definite relationship between the music and visuals, the title of the song can be seen in the opening 5 seconds as the camera pans into a bay, this shows the audience straight away what the video will consist of, the whole video is based on the adequately simple ‘Bay’. The simplicity of the video relates to the beat and style of the song and the style of the band, they are very clean cut and monotonous. This relationship between the lyrics and visuals in the video works very well as the song is so simple.

The genre metronomy best fit into is minimalist indie, they can also be related to dance as there is a lot of keyboard work inside their music, both these genres have many characteristics that can be seen in the video, the genre of indie includes a lot of performance in videos, this is mixed with the dance genre’s characteristics, one of these can be seen in that of the women in bikinis, the director of this video has completely turned these conventions on their heads, mixing the two in very different ways. The dancing behind the singers and players was choreographed to match the beat and compliment the lyrics, it is very cleverly done.

The band share many close ups, this can be a demand of the record company, they may demand that the audience can see the artist for a large portion of the video. The band are shown playing and singing together with no expression on their faces, this further accentuates the monotonous attitude of the band. The fact that they keep straight faces throughout really has an impact on the video as it is beautifully composed and in keeping with the clean music.

The women in the video are sometimes in provocative positions but they are never portrayed as sexual objects. The men in the video are completely oblivious to the women, this contradicts what you would expect from a video including women in bikinis. Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze cannot be applied, but it can be seen as contradicted as the men do not look at the women, the contradiction adds to the powerful simplicity of the video. Women are presented in a way that is not sexual but more of a beauty aspect as they are not an object of desire.

The editing in the video adds to the sleekness and clean cut aspect of the video, the editing techniques used are very unique, the screen is sometimes split into two shots panoramically and the gaps are sometimes filled in with filler shots that include foliage and the women.  This is one of the things which make the video so memorable. The shots that could be boring are animated by the side panels being in action.