Get Lost in the Enticing Video for Wax Cowboy's track Scott.

By Cole Young

The video for Wax Cowboy’s new song “Scott” is part music video part short film. Fully equipped with subtitles we get to learn all about the partially fictionalized character, who is, in fact, a hybrid of several people that members of the band and the director, the talented Lester Lyons-Hookham, have encountered in real life. 

We follow Scott as he dances down the street to the jolty rhythm of the song, as he crashes the band’s practice offering them unwanted advice and we join him at home while he gleefully ganders at his large collection of memorabilia and vintage postcards and menus. The film offers the rare chance to journey into a stranger's life for two and a half minutes. As Lyons-Hookham describes it, “It’s a collective recounting - telling the tale of the internal life of a stranger.”

The aesthetic of the film used to record the video blends perfectly with the soft tones of the song. Wax Cowboy takes influence from Mac Demarco’s famous jizz-jazz sounds and matches it with mid-nineties sounds reminiscent of bands such as Pavement and R.E.M. The melodic lead guitar often takes charge of the song pushing the vocals back in the mix where they faintly cry out, almost as to purposely not let you know what he’s singing. 

All in all the video is a charming vintage-feeling short story. It wasn’t designed to shock or stun the viewer, it’s just a nice little glimpse into someone else’s life. In the age of everyone constantly trying to be more outrageous and distinguished than the next, Wax Cowboy take a step back and just want to tell a calm story about Scott.