Ranking the OK Go Video Catalogue: Are the Videos Always Better Than the Songs?

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Their new video is toast-ally awesome! (We’re sorry!)

At what point do we stop referring to OK Go as a “band” and start calling them a “team of viral video producers who provide the background music for their videos”? This isn’t a bad thing — creativity is creativity — and we think it would be more accurate. After all, do you remember anything about “This Too Shall Pass” other than its music video?

The band just released the video for “Last Leaf” and it’s very clever! They got artist Geoff McFetridge to animate a short Flash video and send them all the frames. Then, as most people would do, they programmed a laser to etch each frame into a slice of toast and then used a free fancy camera from Samsung to make what it quite possibly the world’s first film animated on bread.

More on TIME.com: YouTube’s 50 best viral videos

But what’s almost as interesting as the music video is the fact that the song is not bad at all; it’s a haunting acoustic ballad that sounds much gentler (or, if you want to get all amateur rock historian, more “personal”) than the band’s other hits. In fact, on the coolness scale, we’d give the song a score of 5.5 and the video a score of 7.5, giving “Last Leaf” an OK Go Song/Video Quality Variance score of -2. Let’s see how the band’s other singles score in OKGSVQV:

“A Million Ways”

[vodpod id=Video.4874580&w=425&h=350&fv=]

Song: 4
Video: 6.5
OKGSVQV: -2.5

“Here It Goes Again”

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPmhTCaDkGA”%5D

Song: 7.5
Video: 9
OKGSVQV: -1.5

“End Love”

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2fpgpanZAw”%5D

Song: 3.5
Video: 8.5
OKGSVQV: -5

“White Knuckles”

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHlJODYBLKs”%5D

Song: 5
Video: 7
OKGSVQV: -2

“This Too Shall Pass”

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w”%5D

Song: 7
Video: 9.5
OKGSVQV: -2.5

Definitive Results: “Here It Goes Again” had the highest OKGSVQV score, due largely to its having the highest Song Quality score. (It’s that darn hook!) Somewhat surprisingly, there tended to be a slight linear correlation between song quality and video quality, roughly centered around the equation VQ = SQ + 2. Sign that perhaps our audio and visual cortexes influence each other? Or maybe just that OK Go plans its best concepts for the songs it likes the most?