Pinback’s Rob Crow and Zach Smith touch down on a prehistoric planet in the new music video “Sherman,” exclusively premiered below. But their space boots follow in the obscure sci-fi footprints of 1962 cult Soviet film Planeta Bur.
“It had everything!” Pinback vocalist, guitarist and culture geek Crow told Wired about the oft-rebooted sci-fi flick. “Spaceships, a robot, a hovercar and a creepy scientist.”
Just a few years later, footage from the film was heavily grafted by low-budget cinema kingpin Roger Corman into Americanized B-movie rip-offs. Corman’s film “ Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet took Planeta Bur, removed the credits, renamed the characters and added some American actors,” Crow said. “Then in 1968, Corman had Peter Bogdanovich take that film, add scenes of ladies in silly dresses throwing rocks at a statue on the beach, and call it Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women.”
Crow has added his own fingerprints to the serial borrowing. He mashed all three films into visuals for Pinback’s extensive tour, which starts Nov. 9 in Philadelphia, in support of the indie rockers’ new release, Information Retrieved, released Tuesday by Temporary Residence Ltd.
The result is an intimately understated sci-fi splice from the duo’s fifth full-length, which recalls the floating laptop pop of its earlier recordings Summer in Abaddon and Blue Screen Life. Like those albums, “Sherman” gets more hypnotic with each listen.
Watch the video and soak in the single’s low-fi space soap, and make sure to look for Planeta Bur‘ s viral replications at one of Pinback’s energetic concerts. There’s a galaxy of dates to choose from, from November into February, from America to Europe (often alongside shows with bassist and vocalist Smith‘s underrated cult-rock band, Three Mile Pilot).
By the time the tour kicks off, Smith and Crow should be well healed from the debilitations of filming “Sherman,” whose low-budget hijinks came with some high risks.
“Zach and I got heat stroke filming our spacesuit scenes in a rock quarry in the ridiculously hot weather,” Crow said. “The space car was a rented golf cart modded to look like a DeLorean. Also, I crashed the DeLorean.”
Begin transmission! Information Retrieved, Pinback’s first album for indie label Temporary Residence Ltd., is out Tuesday.
Image courtesy Temporary Residence Ltd.
