Jan 19, 20212 min read

Corridorable - music video review

★★★

We look up at a skater boy as he performs a trick, seeing him only from the back and below. — Still from 'Corridorable' music video

So, you're a skater band; you do skater band things, like skateboarding, and writing skater songs; you play Grunge and call it Punk; and of course you need to make a music video for the most radio-friendly song on your four track LP; if only you could think of something that the video could be about.

Welcome to the world of Hysteria Shack, your new favourite skater band – considering that all the other skater bands grew up in the Naughties, had families, stopped taking drugs, developed a middle-age spread and rather predictably left behind the edgy, couldn't-give-a-shit lifestyle that they sang and preached about. Here it's the 90's again, but somehow without the baggy jeans, basketball shirts and backwards baseball caps. We still get to pretend to the halcyon days of our youth when shafts of sunlight would break through into the corridors of our high school and we would catch sight of the prettiest MOS (that's member of the opposite sex, dudes and dudettes), believing that somehow they would see the real you in an instant of clarity and you would come together in a teen movie kind of way.

But, leaving the Wheatus homage/rip-off to the side for a moment, the video does a good job at revisiting these themes and feelings with its simple, sympathetic and somewhat twee old-timey feel. The scratchy, flarey, box-frame effect is a classic trope for nostalgia nerds, immediately telling us that we're looking back to a simpler time, and allowing us to drift into our own memories even though Super 8 was well past its prime then, too.

However, we happily watch the teenage dirtbags trying some gnarly tricks on their skateboards, and the fact that they're failing miserably only adds to the cutesy feel of it all. There are some nice recurring hooks to keep us interested like the half-bottle of Jack and the painted outline on the ground that at times could be a gigantic cock-and-balls but which actually turns out to be just an aeroplane, and these both serve to keep us bopping along all the way through to the end of the song.

To be honest, that's really about it. There's not much more to the video, or the music, as it's just a simple hook and a couple of riffs repeating for the allotted three minutes. But, what else does it need to be? The video seems to fit the song perfectly and both conjure up the feeling of a 90's adolescence where chicks/dudes and booze (and skateboarding if that's your bag) were the biggest things on your mind. And I'm sure that in 2021, with things the way they are, there are quite a few of us who wouldn't mind going back to a simpler, easier time where our cares and worries are off in the distance, at least for a little while.