SFTRI 770 THE WILLOWZ SEEINSQUARES DVD - OUT NOW
January 18, 2005 - LOS ANGELES When Rolling Stone magazine picked the best albums of the year, they slotted Anaheim's Willowz in among such huge contemporary acts as the White Stripes, Bright Eyes and Sleater-Kinney, and legends Neil Young, Van Morrison and the Rolling Stones themselves. "Talk in Circles" (Sympathy) earns such high praise for its "sweet-and-sour cocktail of buzz-saw guitars," "catchy choruses" and "Stooges propulsion." Never a band to do anything the simple way, Richie James Follin and company have hooked up with 20 + cutting-edge video directors to make a provocative, high-energy DVD companion piece to their smash album, Talk In Circles DVD, plus extra bonus videos from songs off their previous album. Featured directors include Michel Gondry (who used Willowz music to score the underpants dance scene in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), Joe Rubalcaba collaborating with Artificial Army, Ace Norton, Emmy Collins and John Michael McCarthy. Half of the filmmakers are affiliated with the Commondeer production company, including 23-year-old wunderkind Ace Norton. His ebullient trick photography video for "Ulcer Soul" presents the band as suburban superheroes, who by rocking out in their tiny house manage to conquer the laws of gravity--at least until the song ends, and the drummer falls in the pool. In Toben J. Seymour 's "Cons and Tricks," the Willowz play sneaky flies outsmarting the animated spiders who've wrapped them up in audio cable and want to electrocute them. Emmy Collins' "Questionaire" turns the band into living cacti who crawl up out of the desert sand and crawl back in when the sun goes down. And in Buddy Gray’s quirky "Making Certain," the band lives and plays inside a kid's dollhouse and snow globe. The DVD's unquestioned highlight is the video for "Toy" (dir. Joe Rubalcaba /Artificial Army), a wild Caribbean adventure in which bass babe Jessica is kidnapped by pirates. With this DVD, the Willowz make the leap from amazing live and recorded performers to visual trendsetters. What medium will they conquer next? Stay tuned…
from the new issue of Carbon 14 magazine issue #28, August 2006 www.C14.com
from "DVD O.D.," by Falling JamesThe Willowz – See in Squares: A DVD Collective (Sympathy for the Record Industry; www.sympathyrecords.com)
I hate watching videos of ambitious young rock bands lip-synching on a dry-ice-filled soundstage even more than I hate going to the dentist, but these Willowz videos are such arty and distracting exceptions that a few have burned themselves permanently into my subconscious for future dream playback. In fact, the best of these two-dozen videos don't rely on foggy soundstages or singers miming the lyrics at all; instead, they combine magically real imagery to these already fantastically cubed garage-trash songs and actually expand the visual possibilities in your brain, as opposed to most corporate, literal videos, which kill the imagination. These videos constitute an engrossing sampler of modern art-school imagery mixed with the mundane background of the band's suburban Orange County home. The Willowz's songs, which at various times evoke elements of the Minutemen, Pussy Galore, Redd Kross and the White Stripes, are sometimes so short that you find yourself in the unfamiliar position of actually wanting a video to go longer. Director Cory Reeder's video for "No Name Notes" is little more than the band members smashing things and walking in slow motion next to a mobile home under a beautifully fake-looking pink-sunset desert sky; it's gorgeously weird. Trees seems to be a recurring theme in several videos, particularly Charles Spano's timelessly old-timey "Lock Me Out" and during the party in the trees that occurs in John Michael McCarthy's "Equation #2." Most bewitching of all is the Beta Movement's video for "Walk Straight," in which Willowz bassist Jessica Reynoza and singer-guitarist Richie Follin turn into giant trees and plant themselves in a stylized rural field, with black birds flying ominously out of his mouth. It helps that the band members remain visually striking even over the course of 26 disparate video styles, and the trio make for wonderfully charismatic cartoon characters on Artificial Army & Joe Rubalcaba's animated Disney parody, "Toys," another video that subverts the notion of their Anaheim hometown as the happiest place on Earth.
BONUSES: In addition to the 20 videos on the main menu, there are six bonus videos, highlighted by Michel Gondry's stylized B&W take on "I Wonder," which feels like a silent movie and involves some interesting souped-up alterations to a homeless cart. There's also a slide show and, most amazingly, a fairly wild Willowz concert filmed in Nightvision at a Christian summer camp in a rec room filled with screaming kids. The Willowz are so good at creating their own fantasy worlds that by the time you're done watching this DVD, you won't know what's real and what's imaginary anymore. (Falling James)
I WONDER (Michel Gondry)ULCER SOUL (Ace Norton)
CONS AND TRICKS (Toben Seymour)
WALK STRAIGHT (the beta movement)
