Unknown Mortal Orchestra - “Can’t Keep Checking My Phone” Video (NSFW)

What happens when you’re so indecisive that you can’t figure out what idea you want to pursue for a music video? You try to cram them all into one! Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s “Can Keep Checking My Phone” video is a series of vignettes, loosely tied around a “trading card” structure that depicts different “strange occurrences, syndromes, or phenomena.” There’s cryptozoology, abduction, coup d’état, restless leg syndrome, temporal lobe therapy… There’s no big through-line, but co-directors Dimitri Basl and Cooper Roussel manage to wrangle some striking imagery out of all of them. “‘Can’t Keep Checking My Phone’ is so full of sounds and its lyrics are so elusive so I decided that one idea wouldn’t do the track justice,” someone — presumably UMO frontman Ruban Nielson — writes in the Youtube video description. “My approach was to present the multiple ideas as if they were a trading card deck. Trading cards games like Mars attack, have a short description accompanied by illustrations.” Watch below — be warned, there’s some super brief nudity in one of the scenes.