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Music

Up Close and Personal With The Ocean Party. Real Up Close.

The Melbourne band’s new video features a bottle opener and pores.

The Ocean Party are complete chillers. Both in their approach to music and the way they go about their day-to-day, everything seems pretty relaxed. A couple of them work at a bar we frequent and are always good for a friendly chat about music or whatever. The band started in the regional town of Wagga Wagga and it seems their laidback country charm has followed them to the big smoke of Melbourne. Their latest video reflects this honesty.

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Taken from a forthcoming album to be released on Spunk, the twinkling pop of “Wading In” does have elements of Echo and the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon” but also contains a fair dose of loose Australian pop. Besides, Ian McCullogh never shot a super lo fi video in a Brunswick share house where the highlight is someone fidgeting with a bottle opener.

We had a quick chat to the band member Snowy Nasdaq about the clip and bottle openers.

Noisey: The video was shot by Thomas Mendelovits from Milk Teddy. Did he give you any specific directions?

Snowy Nasdaq: Nothing apart from trying to forget that the camera was there. We played a game of ‘obscure celebrity heads’ to take our mind off being filmed while we got progressively drunker, which probably explains the confused looks on our faces. I guess Tom made himself enough of a fly on the wall to get some pretty unflattering angles of us, which is totally fine, we're not into trying in vain to look cool in our videos. Maybe if it was shot in HD the extreme close-ups would be a bit too honest.

Is the bottle opener meant to be a metaphor for anything?

The bottle opener is obviously a phallic symbol. We have a souvenir bottle opener from Bali that is a dick carved out of wood that we were going to use. Tom thought it'd be nice to go for something a bit more subtle.

The Ocean Party's new album will be out soon on Spunk.

Get closer to the Ocean Party when they launch "Wading In";

August 25 in Melbourne at Northcote Social Club

September 13 in Sydney at Marrickvillve Bowlling Club