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The Colinizers – Gravitational Bull
Six years may have passed since "Gravitational Bull" first appeared, but the single loses none of its strange, cartoonish gravity on revisit. Released in June 2019 and animated in Berlin rather than filmed in some cramped Philly basement, the video is a far stranger beast than its title suggests — less bar-band swagger, more fever-dream fable, and all the better for it.

The song itself opens on a bass line that lurches instead of struts, heavy-hipped and slightly drunk on its own momentum, exactly as the title promises. The guitars stagger in with a detuned menace that recalls the band's Sabbath-adjacent instincts, but it's the vocal delivery that carries the mischief — half sneer, half confession, narrating its own downfall with amused detachment before the chorus opens into something genuinely soaring. That refrain, "a hard sale and a soft shell," lands as a sly wink at pop music's own machinery, sharp social commentary dressed up in a hook catchy enough to survive scrutiny.


What elevates the track beyond a strong single is its function as connective tissue. This isn't a standalone curiosity but the first panel of a triptych, sitting alongside a cover of "Sympathy for the Devil" and the seasonal detour "Christmas Pudding," all three orbiting the same fictional universe: "Crackpot Jackpot," the novel the band has been quietly building toward. The animation introduces characters who apparently populate that book, which explains the video's peculiar density — every frame seems to be doing double duty, seeding a narrative rather than simply illustrating a chorus. It's an unusual gamble for a rock band to make, closer to the ambitions of a concept album married to a graphic novel than a typical promotional clip, and the fact that it holds together at all speaks to a genuine creative vision rather than scattershot ambition.


Recorded at Fat-Finger Studios on home turf, the track carries the unmistakable stamp of a band operating at ease with itself. The rhythm section locks into a pocket that never rushes to prove anything, letting tension build through repetition, while the guitar work stays razor-edged without tipping into indulgence. Compared with the group's earlier material, the lyric writing here feels noticeably sharper — funnier, stranger, more confident in its own internal logic — which tracks with the band's own claim that this sits among their most accomplished lyrical work.


Coming from a five-piece already several albums into a long career, with a sixth full-length titled "Bigger Whole" reportedly in progress, "Gravitational Bull" reads less like a stray single than a statement of intent. The animated trilogy, the interlocking fictional world, the talk of eventually pitching the whole sprawling apparatus to a streaming platform — it all suggests a band uninterested in simply releasing songs one at a time, preferring instead to build a universe those songs can live inside.


Whether "Crackpot Jackpot" ever finds its way to shelves or screens, "Gravitational Bull" stands on its own as proof that The Colinizers treat every release as a piece of something larger — infectious, slightly unhinged, and utterly convinced of its own carnival logic.