Matching the video to the bandOzomatli looked...

Matching the video to the band

Ozomatli looked to the visual for inspiration when writing its new album, “Don’t Mess With the Dragon” (due April 3 on Concord Records) -- much of the initial songwriting came out of jam sessions at the Tropico de Nopal art gallery. Now the veteran L.A. nine-piece might have found a vision to suit its sound.

The new video for the single “Can’t Stop” is a dizzying collage of stop-animation and storytelling that seems equal to Ozomatli’s mashing of Latin flavors, rock, hip-hop and funk -- a hybrid many have said is distinctly Los Angeles.

“We haven’t had a lot of luck with videos in the past,” acknowledges Ulises Bella, who plays saxophone and clarinet for the band.

Ozomatli turned to New York-based artist-illustrator Richard Borge for “Can’t Stop,” even though the 41-year-old, who had done album art for bands such as Meat Beat Manifesto, had never done a music video.

“He had this signature style that suited a lot of the ideas we had and the imagery we wanted, with lots of subversive things,” Bella says. “It’s a very funky, surreal style, with a lot of almost Da Vinci-esque gadgets going on.”

Borge, who flew to L.A. to meet the band and catch a show at the House of Blues, expanded on his initial guy-chases-girl concept. “The treatment revolved around the gadgets and things the guy would have to go through to get the girl,” Borge says. “But there had to be more. How about the girl helping the guy, but the guy doesn’t know it? I thought that was light and fun.”

The song itself could well be a breakthrough. Bella concedes Ozomatli reined in its arsenal for “Can’t Stop.” “It’s the kind of song that won’t go completely over radio’s head, yet it still sounds like Ozomatli,” he says. “We’ve always been a challenge for radio because they don’t know where to play us.”

Ozomatli performs at 2 p.m. Saturday at Hollywood & Highland as part of an antiwar protest.

He had songs, but no band

Like for a lot of artists, inspiration strikes Jason Evigan at inconvenient times. “Like when you’re laying in bed in that half-dream, half-delirious state -- that’s when I get a lot of my ideas,” says the singer-songwriter of the L.A. rock band After Midnight Project.

Unlike most artists, though, he only has to stumble up a flight of stairs to commit his late-night ideas to recordings. There, in his Woodland Hills home, is the studio where Evigan moved on from the harder-edged music of his previous band, Dillusion, and honed a more melodic metal.

“I had no real intention of making it public,” Evigan says of his newer material, which might fit on a radio playlist with the likes of Hinder or Sick Puppies and has already found a home (the single “Take Me Home”) on the Xbox game Prey. “But a friend told me, ‘Dude, this is the best stuff you’ve ever made.’ ”

At the time, though, Evigan had no band -- he had to assemble players just to make the first video. None of those guys are still around, and Evigan, bassist T.J. Armstrong, drummer Dan Morris and guitarists Spencer Bastian and Christian Meadows now make up After Midnight Project.

As Evigan tries to stretch his songwriting -- “Some of the new material is about the war, and before it was more about relationships and people that come and go in your life,” he says -- the unsigned quintet has gotten some feelers from record labels. For now, they’re honing their chops playing a residency at the Key Club’s free Ruby Tuesdays this month.

Fast

forward

* Touts: With much of the music industry in Austin, Texas, for this week’s South by Southwest Music Festival, the club schedule doesn’t really heat up until next week. But there’s some punk rock to be heard -- the Briggs and Time Again play Friday at the Knitting Factory, and Saturday the Epitaph Tour (featuring the Matches and the Higher, among others) comes to the El Rey Theatre.... The post-SXSW flood begins Monday, with hot Scots the Fratellis at the Troubadour.... Then it’s Dirty on Purpose at the Echo on Tuesday, and British bands Goldrush and the Electric Soft Parade playing Club NME at Spaceland on Wednesday.

-- Kevin Bronson

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Recommended downloads

* To watch the video for Ozomatli’s “Can’t Stop,” visit the Buzz Bands blog at latimes.com/buzzbands.

* Stream After Midnight Project’s “Wilted” at www.myspace.com/aftermidnightproject