If you've skulked around these parts of the internet previously, you may have noted that videos and most things visual tend to wind up on
our new-fangled Tumblr site. This, the main hub, is predominantly stuffed full of words. Similes, the odd metaphor perhaps, but the bulk, the stodge, is script. It's extraordinary for the guts of Youtube and Vimeo to be draped across Dots & Dashes, yet when something as extraordinary as
NIVA's Dirty Water drifts past, the moment must be cinched with both hands. Judging by the Johan Haglund-directed video itself, Dirty Water is a reference to the blackest of coffee as the menial, everyday tasks of a lone protagonist are documented, before the caffeinated H20 begins to drip from the ceilings and walls, and all this over four and a half superb minutes. Delivered via Vimeo, the musty specks of dust that fly from his socks are, in HD, proffered as glorious bits of beauty, while the clarity with which the nail cutting sequence is delivered makes perhaps the most excruciating, quintessentially human action all the more eye-gluing.
As repugnant a sight as someone performing said act in a public space may be as they meticulously gather the trimmings into neatly arranged, angular piles, it's one that is practically indelible from the mind, and here it's no different. Musically however, tinged with reminiscences of summer while remaining distinctly wintry, Dirty Water is Nordic popular song at its most forthrightly stirring, and contains as impassioned a chorus as imaginable to boot.
Dirty Water is out now via
Something In Construction.
