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Watch Yellowbirds’ Hand-Cut Animated ‘Young Men of Promise’ Video

Yellowbirds 'Young Men of Promise' Video

On May 28, former Apollo Sunshine singer Sam Cohen will release the second album from his Yellowbirds, a band which parlays the man’s knack for far-out rock into a tighter sort of psych-pop bliss. Songs From the Vanished Frontier will arrive via Brooklyn’s Royal Potato Family label and is preceded by the video for “Young Men of Promise,” seen above. The song itself is equal parts fuzzy and fizzy — a jangly number that evokes a mussed-up Shins or a tidier Of Montreal. “Meeting you was like a car crash,” Cohen sings at the start, “I’m a river, you’re a raging sea.” The bright songcraft makes that sound like a positive proposition, while the clip extends that aural playfulness into the visual realm. Cohen directed and animated the thing himself using the artwork of Kara Smith.

“I love her ideas and colors,” said Cohen via statement. “The song is inspired by experiences on the road when I was younger. That doesn’t connect in any direct way to her work, but with my animations, the connection to the lyrics is almost never literal, and if it is, it’s only for a split second. The images are just flying by. Some of my favorite parts are the jogging ladies because, to me, they have ambition and discipline, like a young band, and that kind of connects with the pompous little boy at the end, the little ‘young man of promise.’ I also like the dancing men and the unicyclist on the tightrope and the boy juggling balls with his head; they’re sort of clowns to entertain, a feeling I had spending eight hours a day in a van for 45 minutes onstage.”

Cohen will no doubt get to expeience that all over again soon. Track list below.

Yellowbirds, Songs From the Vanished Frontier:

1. “Stop Tonight”
2. “Mean Maybe”
3. “Love Stories”
4. “Young Men of Promise”
5. “The Ceiling”
6. “The Vanished Frontier”
7. “Julian”
8. “For Girls Who Love to Sing”
9. “What’s Out There”