Pick away at anything long enough and it’ll be an art form, and that includes whatever we were doing in the mid-90s. Arguably, Skeleton Club have had two and a half decades to perfect their video for “Wormz” and the result is gloriously bizarre lo-fi bliss.
From Skeleton Club’s recent EP, ONLY HUMANS, “Wormz” was already a standout track for just how bizarre it was. Considering bizarre is Skeleton Club’s bread and butter, that’s probably saying something.
Built on a beat that stills uneasily underfoot, it’s somehow reminiscent of David Seville’s—yes, David Seville of The Chipmunks fame—1958 hit, “Witch Doctor” or Blue Swede’s 1974 cover of B.J. Thomas’ “Hooked on a Feeling.” It’s an oddball song about an inordinate obsession with fishing and the disastrous prospect that the worms might raise up as an army that will seek out revenge against a society that has for too long sacrificed them as bait.
“All I can say is that our infamous lead singer, ‘Syd,’ has a strange affinity for fishing,” says Skeleton Club’s drummer Morgan Zwicker. “He’s a West Coast boy turned Montrealer who craves a good day on the boat with a couple (too many) of Oland’s and a bucket of worms. He tends to drop everything he’s doing (not that he ever holds a job for long anyway) on an impulse to go fishing. It’s a problem I think he should probably work out to balance his lifestyle.
“That’s pretty much it. Any ‘deeper meaning’ in this song/video is far too lost within his convoluted brain.”
What we have learned, however, is that Skeleton Club have found themselves a penchant for the very finest of tropes in video transitions and effects. This is the cream of the crop as far as any high school multimedia class, circa 1998, can offer. The absolute peak ’90s post-grunge technology; the sort of stuff George Lucas once dreamt of and then tastefully discarded in a bin so that someone else might further refine it decades later. Given enough time though, and even that becomes an artform.