Reviews
Album review: Ocean Grove – ODDWORLD
Melbourne party-starters Ocean Grove get weird in both good ways and bad on album number four…
Danny Worsnop's Best Bad Habit video really is a head-scratcher. So we've scratched our heads and we're still a bit baffled…
Asking Alexandria frontman Danny Worsnop unveiled his video for Best Bad Habit yesterday. Coming ahead of the release of his second solo album, Shades Of Blue, in which he swaps metalcore for country-influenced crooning, it shows him having a whale of a time in his kitchen putting together a meaty meal for man’s best friend.
It’s a fun video, and shows off his vocal chops (nb. this is not a meat joke unless you want it to be), but we’d be lying if we said we didn’t have some questions...
It’s a good apron, no doubt, but there are a lot of ideas butting heads on it. Acquiring it was probably a case of seeing it in a shop or online and thinking it was nice, but it might have been a more exhaustive process of trying to find exactly what he wanted.
“Hi, Danny Worsnop here. Have you got an apron mainly based around pineapples, but with gingham detailing on the strap and pockets?”
“We certainly do!”
“Does it have some sort of nautical emergency message spray-painted on the front?”
“YOU BET YOUR ASS IT DOES!”
How many shops turned him away with a pineapple apron with gingham straps that didn’t quite have what he wanted sprayed on the front? Imagine Danny looking forlornly at a pineapple apron with gingham straps with “OK!” sprayed on the front, or one with S.O.S. on it like he wanted, but where the design was based around watermelons instead. Bleak.
Danny Worsnop is an extraordinarily confident frontman on stage, and while he’s brought plenty of that rock star charisma to this kitchen, he seems considerably less sure about some of his cooking decisions than he could be. A confident chef lays a steak down and lets it cook until the time comes to turn it over, while a more nervous one will prod it endlessly, tweaking everything unnecessarily. There seems to be a lot of over-fiddling going on, a habit Worsnop will want to get out of if ever considering a career in the culinary arts. And he adds more oil (that’s lovely olive oil btw, infused with California garlic) midway through cooking – oil that’s at room temperature! Nooooo!
Danny Worsnop plays the guitar. While he concentrates on vocals in Asking Alexandria, he’s played the guitar since he was a child, and has even set up his own acoustic guitar company. Why, then, when his guitar appears in the video, does he play it like someone’s dad twatting about with a tennis racquet? He plays the guitar, and plays it well, but looks like he’s on Whose Line Is It Anyway? doing a bit. Mighty strange.
At the beginning of the video, Danny crushes some garlic with a cleaver (he’s going to have to clean the work-surface of his whole kitchen island as a result – could he not have considered using a small chopping board?) and places it atop his steak. However, at some point it un-crushes itself – by the time Worsnop’s dog (one of three he owns – we can’t be sure whether this is Cowboy, Loki or Thor) chows down on it, the cloves have reassembled themselves. There’s some sort of reverse-Thanos action going on there.
It’s a really nice kitchen, complete with elevated microwave, spacious island, dishwasher, large fridge (complete with a shopping list stuck on with a magnet), a good-looking set of knives and what looks like a very small cow’s skull. Worsnop is a hard-living man, the kind of guy that downs shots of Leadslingers Fighting Spirit whiskey while preparing a meal for his dog – so how does he keep the place so pristine? Especially when, as shown in the closing frames, he doesn’t seem to have any goddamn washing-up liquid. It’s a mystery!
Danny Worsnop's Shades Of Blue is set for release through Sumerian Records on May 10.