POPSCREEN: Asobi Seksu - "Goodbye"

You might already have Asobi Seksu—Japanese for “playful sex”—in your iTunes library, since Apple recently offered the song “Thursday” as a free download. The NYC band combines poppish rock and a moody pan-Asian sound with the voice of potentially attractive singer/keyboardist Yuki Chikudate, to produce a sugary ambient effect.

The music video for “Goodbye” finds its influences not in the sexiness of the band’s name but rather in its Japanese background. The aesthetic scheme of the video is origami, and little happens besides the shifting of a number of colorful designs decorating the screen and Yuki singing and moping around the paper landscape. I mentioned Yuki’s “potential” attractiveness because it’s hard to get a good look at her face, what with her side bangs and all the millisecond close-ups.

The song is actually pretty good, though not as good as “Thursday,” and what I find particularly interesting are the lyrics. Yuki opens by singing, “Once I had a girlfriend / She made my heart just want to die,” and she spends the rest of the song going on about this girlfriend. It makes me wonder two things: first, who is she singing about, and second, who wrote these lyrics?

Overall, this video is frustrating because it lacks any real action. The origami designs that keep coming at you constantly are neat for the first 20 seconds, but they get old. The video also has no plot, nothing to do with the enticing lyrics, and no satisfying shots of the band. Origami should be used for cover art, and a relatively off-the-radar band like Asobi Seksu should draw in prospective fans with riskier, more interesting visual effects. Let’s hope their next video riffs a little more on the idea of playful sex.

—Andrew F. Nunnelly