Austin, TX indie folk band Under the Rug will certainly be the first (and possibly only) band to ever feature a singing bowl of oatmeal in a music video.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. With their third album Homesick For Another World coming out later this month, the band recently released the single “Turkey Vulture”, a somber folk ballad that builds into a classic-sounding rock number, sprinkled with mandolin and piano and breezy vocals. Inspired by watching actual turkey vultures swarming a walnut tree while leering down at recent roadkill, lead singer Casey Dayan says:
They reminded me of death, but they were also powerful and prehistoric, somehow—and somewhere along the way, I started to really like them. In some ways, for me at least, they became a symbol of befriending grim-ness: that death is inevitable, that this lil’ world of ours can be terrible and cruel, but it is also a beautiful world, and in many ways, is what we make of it.
These themes of befriending grimness and making the most out of this sometimes terrible, other times beautiful world, come through in the track’s video. Opening with Dayan looking near-death as he sings to us from his back, the video introduces us next to his turkey vulture friend, who sings along with lines like “Nobody can tell me how to feel” with Dayan. Another scene finds the Vulture about to eat from a bowl of oatmeal, only to stop when finding Dayan’s face as part of the breakfast, continuing signing along (hence my opening line about a singing bowl of oatmeal).
The video is surreal, at times silly in a joyful way, and certainly makes you feel like the world, even the darker parts of it like turkey vultures, isn’t so bad. View the video above, and stream the track here!
The Indy Review 
1 Comment