Sometimes a good music video does just one thing really, really well.
That’s the case with the Eric Wren-directed video for Survival’s
“Tragedy Of The Mind.” Survival are the new and
old band of Liturgy frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, and it’s hard not to
get excited for their debut album with every new song we’ve heard. The
video for “Tragedy” is so simple (a single unmoving shot) yet its
execution is as powerful as the music. Starting with a flaming mic
cable, the band’s instruments are thrown one by one into a growing fire
while occasional streams of gas help it grow; nothing else happens, and
nothing else needs to happen.
Survival are a much more psychedelic band
than Liturgy, and here they are perfectly complemented by these hypnotic
flames. Guitars are smashed and burned; drumheads melt and peel apart.
In a moment of (seemingly) natural chance a floor tom falls in a way so
that we can see smoke building up and collecting inside — until the
flames explode and shoot through like a fucking cannon. It’s a video
that perfectly captures this band at this moment.
Empire Of The Sun’s sense of silliness was beyond apparent when they released the trailer for their sophomore album Ice On The Dune. We continue where it left off in the video for first single “Alive.”
It features the band and others in a desert-jungle situation, many
dressed as wild animals. But between the bawdy costuming and the digital
orbs throughout, I am getting non-stop flashbacks to the Lonely
Island’s “Space Olympics.” Day made.
The Montreal Solo Artist Pulls On a Blue Dress in His New Video
Cross-dressing and later undressing, off-kilter Canadian
pop singer Mac DeMarco smears makeup and whipped cream over his face in
the new video for lo-fi glam lullaby, “My Kind of Woman,” taken from his
second album, 2. “We wanted to do something different, so
changed the track’s original intention of being a love song between a
man and a woman to become an ode between a man and himself—his feminine
self,” says Alex Lill, director of the Newcomer Pictures-produced short.
Singing under a spotlight in front of burgundy curtains, the
22-year-old protagonist brings to mind Isabella Rossellini’s noir
nightclub performance in Blue Velvet, until the curtains are
ripped away to reveal DeMarco wandering, bewildered, around a crowded,
prop-strewn junkyard in La Brea, Los Angeles. The flamboyant
musician and occasional psychedelic video artist has come a long way
since the days he earned his money by paving roads and participating in
medical experiments before the music started paying its way—he recently
toured the US with Gallic indie superstars, Phoenix.
Here’s “Fuzz’s Fourth Dream,” another track from Ty Segall’s new
psych band Fuzz. Its black and white clip is pretty low-key, primarily
just the trio performing together. But what makes it so great is seeing
Segall get his Don Henley on and how amused he is by his own drumming.
It’s hard not to smile with him.
When she’s not singing and drumming in Grass Widow, Lillian Maring also
plays music by herself under the moniker as Ruby Pins. Her self-titled,
self-recorded debut LP has been in the making for over a year; below,
check out her first single, “Chameleon.” The full-length is out now via
the always-excellent M’Lady’s Records.
You guys ever go to spin class? You guys ever get really bummed out
when the spin class soundtrack is dominated by Black Eyed Peas and a
poorly rendered dubstep refix of Britney Spears? Annie makes the kind of
lovely pop that is not only infectious and endearing, but would be
perfect to keep you motivated while doing push-ups on a stationary bike.
For the video for “Tube Stops And Lonely Hearts,” she could have gone
completely literal and done a clip featuring the love-thirsty on
commuter rails — or, in line with the lyrics, ruminating on ’90s rave
culture. Instead, she punctuates scenes of her singing in a bright
hallway with shots of a rooftop spin class. It’s a little weird, but it
works.
Like Bad Company and Minor Threat before them, balls-out Norwegian
metal ragers Kvelertak have named an absolutely kickass song after the
band itself — an always-appreciated way of laying out exactly who the
band is, of making a mission statement. Weirdly, the song doesn’t appear
on the band’s 2010 self-titled debut but on Meir, its equally great new follow-up. That album has already given us amazing videos for “Bruane Brenn” and “Månelyst,” and now they’ve made a video for “Kvelertak” with director Stian Andersen,
and this one is a band-on-the-road deal. We see the heavily inked dudes
in the band ripping through sweaty clubs, drinking, riding motorcycles,
and wearing owls on their heads, true vikings all the while.
The new video for “Affection,” one of the prettier songs from Crystal Castles’ 2012 album (III), is made up entirely of distorted digital footage that band members and friends shot during their recent South American tour. Stephen Agnew
edited everything together, turning it into a forbidding blur, though
the images of Alice Glass you see here are still way clearer than any
view of her you’ll get from watching Crystal Castles live.
Once again: God bless K-pop. G-Dragon is one of South Korea’s biggest
pop stars, and he came up completely within the country’s regimented
and market-tested idol-factory system. But he’s apparently also the only
person alive who believes that Missy Elliott’s brain-exploding
videography didn’t go far enough. He’s here to fix that problem.
The abstract saxophone world-creator Colin Stetson has already made one video for two of the songs from his new album New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light, and the dual video
for “In Mirrors” and “And In Truth” focused on snow-capped mountainous
landscapes. The new video for Stetson’s suffused-with-awe “Among The Sef”
turns its attention toward another element, water. In the clip, we see
gorgeous, beyond-comprehension black-and-white footage of seawaters
churning, of enormous plumes of spray, of whales surfacing, with some
deeply unsettling images of shadowy masked figures creeping in at the
end. Isaac Gale and David Jensen directed the video.
Taken By Trees is the former Concretes singer Victoria Bergsman, and last year, she released Other Worlds,
a truly gorgeous album of tropical synthpop that flew under a lot of
radars. If you missed out on it, all the more reason to watch her new
video for “Only You,” a love song with an immaculate Swedish-reggae
float to it. In director Armen Harootun‘s
video, she’s blindfolded at a strobe-lit party, and she’s the only
person there who isn’t making out with somebody.
Earlier this month, we got “Check My Heart,” a track from vanguard indie-poppers the Pastels’ Slow Summit,
their first full-length since 1997. The band worked with Blair Young of
the Forest Of Black on the album, who also directs the clip, which
features a rec hall party where the DJ spins records and not from
Serato.
The crazy-exciting young British dance duo Disclosure released their new buoyant single “You & Me,” a collaboration with the singer-songwriter Eliza Doolittle, last week.
And today, we get the video, a beautifully shot and edited story about a
young couple traveling through Europe together. We see them making out,
drinking, arguing, dancing, backflipping, getting lost, jumping into
absurdly blue water, riding roller coasters, smacking each other with a
dildo. It’s all just terribly romantic and inviting, and when the actual
Disclosure show up near the end, it’s finally like: “Oh right, this is a
music video.”
Sigur Rós is gearing up to release LP Kveikur
in June and here is “Ísjaki,” our second helping from the record. It
comes with a lyric video featuring an ominous hooded character, a total
dichotomy with the swoony, energetic track. It’s a conundrum! But a
lovely one. It’s no wonder that the band is so beloved by oddball Danny DeVito.
Last time down the official video track, MNDR’s Amanda Warner substituted Drag Race star Raven for herself in a very real, very closeup, cabaret club treatment. This time through in the John Threat-directed clip for “Faster Horses”
it’s MNDR herself — awash in a sea of animation, barking beagles,
trademark oversized frames, and horses (naturally!) — in a giddy
fairytale with a cute, blue-eyed finale.
Now that Rocky is a legit mainstream rap star with a #1 album to his
credit, the comparatively ferocious A$AP Ferg is the next member of the
A$AP Mob on track to do big things. Ferg’s “Work” was something of an underground hit last year, and he’s been touting his forthcoming Trap Lord
mixtape for what feels like months. Now we get the dark, heady video
for the slow banger “Persian Wine,” in which Ferg shows off his gleaming
fronts, his silk robes, and his gun collection, while people with
bandanas over their faces dance around with torches. Ferg himself
co-directs alongside Thuan Tran.
For the upcoming Empty Estate EP, Wild Nothing is embedding
its dream-pop output with off-kilter elements. Its first single “A
Dancing Shell” is flecked with free jazz and feels subtly indebted to
Talking Heads’ “This Must Be The Place,” a strong turn from Wild
Nothing’s straight-forward rocking but still born from the chimeric
influence we know from the outfit. Watch the animated clip for “A
Dancing Shell”.
The Montreal band Young Galaxy worked with former Studio member and Balearic production don Dan Lissvik on their new album Ultramarine,
and the end result just sparkles, so you might expect the album’s music
videos to do the same. You would be wrong. In making his video for the
gorgeous synthpop jam “Pretty Boy,” director Luke McCutcheon
has made something simultaneously sweet and fucking creepy. In a dingy
and snowy city, we see a love story unfold between two people with
terrifying latex covering their faces: A blank-as-death woman and an
artificially old man. Watch it below, and good luck figuring out what’s
supposed to be going on.
The last time British art-poppers Dutch Uncles made a video, it was the dance-happy clip for “Flexxin,” and it was an absolute and uncomplicated delight. The band’s new clip for “Bellio” doesn’t leave the same impression, but it’s an absolutely pleasant way to spend three minutes. For the video, director Isaac Eastgate
has put together a series of sharply photographed, close-up images of
marine life: undulating octopus tentacles, fluttering anemones, shark
teeth. The individual shots can be fascinating, and there’s something
profoundly relaxing about their cumulative effect.
In
making the video for “Ministry Of Love,” the title track of their debut
album, the glamorous L.A. dream-rockers IO Echo reassembled the same
team of programmers who helped put together Arcade Fire’s mind-boggling “We Used To Wait”
interactive experience. The IO Echo video doesn’t have that same sense
of reach and vision, and it doesn’t play with your memories the same
way. Instead, it shows a series of visually distorted images of the band
playing, and it lets you toy with them in some interesting ways. Even
if it doesn’t rearrange your headspace (and even if it will seriously
fuck up if you’re running too many other programs), the video is still a
pretty neat indication of the things technology can do for music
videos. Check it out at Noisey.
This is the sort of thing that helps me get up in the morning: Robotic R&B stars Ciara and Future are totally in love, and they’ve now collaborated on Ciara’s miasmic sex-jam “Body Party,” the best single she’s had in years. And now Director X
has made a video in which the two meet at a party and Ciara, either in
the video’s reality or in her own head, gives Future a bedroom lap
dance. It’s simultaneously sexy and adorable, and Future’s mumbly
line-readings are either terrible or perfectly method.
The Swedish indie-pop band Shout Out Louds shared their new video for the catchy single “Illusions” off of their latest release Optica.
In the video, a nervous brunette takes a stab at speed dating — she
encounters an assortment of over-eager weirdos and is forced to dance
with them under a strobe light. It sounds like a terrible night, but lo
and behold, our protagonist meets a dancing fool named “Harpal” and
finally starts having some fun.
Director Zircon Prince frames the ever-prolific aural experimentalist Roberto Carlos Lange (the man behind Helado Negro)
next to this track’s guest singer John Philpot (the honeyed voice of
Bear In Heaven), as the two trade verses in English and Spanish over
Lange’s oscillating outre synth-dub stew. There’s a ship out at sea,
too, so let that percolate in your subconscious as you let this one wash
over you.
The video for “After The Afterlife,”
the new single from art-music duo CocoRosie, is full of beautiful
images: Bodies floating through water, waves crashing against
cliff-faces. But it also has ominous things — fire and flashing lights
and a monster chasing you — filmed in beautiful ways. All that seems
appropriate for a pretty song about what happens to you when you die.
Director Mike Basich filmed the video in Hawaii, and you can watch it
below.
Last week, prolific San Franciscan garage-psych warriors Thee Oh Sees released their impressive new Floating Coffin
album, and their new video for the falsetto wig-out “Toe Cutter – Thumb
Buster” is a way tenser and less fanciful affair than the similarly
violent “Minotaur” video. The clip, from director John Strong,
chronicles, with wince-worthy cartoon realism, a couple of fraught
moments in the life of a mass murderer, and it shows just how dangerous a
bag of groceries can be in the wrong hands.
Lana Del Rey has never downplayed her affection for Nancy Sinatra —
you might remember she called herself a “self-styled gangsta Nancy
Sinatra” back in the “Video Games” days. Now, out of nowhere, she’s
covering a song Nancy made famous with Lee Hazelwood in 1967. LDR’s
“Summer Wine” clip comes only weeks after her version of Leonard Cohen’s
“Chelsea Hotel No. 2,”
and like that cover, this one is pretty damn faithful to the original.
Also like that song, this one has no compelling reason to exist, but
doesn’t make the world a more horrible place, either. The vid itself is
filmed on a Super 8 (or some equivalent vintage equipment), and like
everything else in the visual world today, looks like an Instagram
product.
HAIM were on this week’s episode of Later With Jools Holland and performed “Forever” from their EP of the same title. While each
sister in the band is bursting with panache, we can all agree that the
ever-emotive bassist Este’s facial contortions while they’re playing are
totally mesmerizing? Total dedication to nailing every single bass
chord.
Miguel might have invited fellow genre-defining young genius Kendrick
Lamar to kick a quick verse on the buttery seduction song “How Many Drinks?,”
but he wasn’t about to let the kid take over the video. Until Kendrick
shows up for his verse, this thing is all Miguel. It’s an absolutely
slick performance video, the kind of thing that should convince any
skeptics that they should go see this guy live at their first
opportunity. When Kendrick does show up, he and Miguel show a nice
clown-around rapport; I’d absolutely watch a sitcom about these two.
Clark Jackson directs.
Last year, A-Trak put together a bunch of collaborations with different producers on his Tuna Melt EP. And that EP’s title track, a team-up with fellow producer Tommy Trash, now has a pretty ridiculously great video. Ryan Staake directed the clip, but much of the credit goes to the kinetic artist Kinetic King,
who set up an entire house full of dominoes and then proceeded to knock
them all down in the most absurd, Rube Goldbergian manner imaginable.
Pieces of toast, strings, water, stacked plastic cups, and one paper
airplane are also involved, and I really hope this whole thing is real
and none of it is CGI. Watch it below and marvel at how much work
someone put into something so beautifully pointless.
Matthew E. White released a video last year for “Will You Love Me,” and now he has a new one for “Steady Pace,” another fantastic song off his 2012 debut, Big Inner.
The video incorporates the album artwork, and some charming stop motion
as White, dressed in a white suit and shot on a white set, dances in a
little modest shuffle. Just like his album last year, it’s really hard
not to be won over by White’s charisma here.
The Woods/Vivian Girls side project the Babies released their sophomore album
Our House On The Hill last year, and it’s one of those albums that
seems slight at first but sticks with you. The fast, catchy jangle “Mess Me
Around” is a prime example of the album’s stickiness, and now it’s got a video
from director Scott Jacobson. In
the video, the band’s members hitchhike their way to a show, demonstrating
exactly why you shouldn’t do that when they meet a ton of nutcases along the
way.
London post-punk group Savages have let go another cut from their upcoming debut full-length, Silence Yourself, out May 7 in the U.S. and May 6 in the UK via Matador. The track is titled "Shut Up" and opens the record.
The band have delivered the track through the following video clip, directed and edited by Giorgio Testi.
It features live footage of "Shut Up" and begins with frontwoman Jehnny
Beth reciting the poem/mission statement from the cover of the record
(above). Watch it below via Dazed Digital.
’90s alt-pop professionals Garbage and Jersey basement-punk heroes
Screaming Females have an unlikely bond. They toured together last year,
and Scremales leader Marissa Paternoster joined Garbage onstage
regularly to cover Patti Smith’s “Because The Night”
(itself the result of an unlikely Smith/Springsteen alliance). Now
they’ve committed that cover to wax, getting together into the studio to
record as one united megaband. The cover sounds huge and ferocious.
Paternoster and Shirley Manson sound pretty amazing in harmony, and
Paternoster gets to play a couple of dragon-slaying guitar solos. Sophie Muller filmed the session in crisp black-and-white and made a music video out of it.
Thus far, the Knife’s massive and intimidating new double album Shaking The Habitual has produced two videos, for “Full Of Fire” and “A Tooth For An Eye,”
that serve and gender-play mini-manifestos. But that’s not the case
with the duo’s new video for “A Cherry On Top,” a near-ambient
nine-minute piece of creeping Lynchian dread. Instead, this one, from
animator Martin Falck, bends the
eye-bleeding pink and green graphics from the album’s butt-ugly cover
art into hypnotic swirls. It’s just the same thing happening over and
over; nothing changes. Those colors being what they are, you may
actually hurt your vision if you stare at this one for too long.
Record Store Day falls in two days, and MGMT are using the
opportunity to resurrect a long-dormant format, releasing their new song
“Alien Days”
as a cassingle. And now they’ve made a 48-second promo video for that
cassingle. It’s a psychedelic stop-motion-animated clip that stars the
cassingle itself, as well as an interstellar sock puppet. Needless to
say, it makes absolutely no sense.
We last featured Pittsburgh-based Scott Benson when he released his cosmic music video for The Murf’s Rendezvous. His new music video for Toh Kay‘s With Any Sort Of Certainty is a story about not being ok, and trying to be.
I’m loving how Scott’s style is developing. Check out the sequence
starting at 2:05 as the photographer leaves his office to see a
brilliant combination of his angular, flat character designs combining
with lush lighting and dimensional cues. At 3:11, as the protagonist’s
world starts to break apart, the pixels tear away as well.
I highly recommending heading over to Scott’s blog to read more about the music video’s genesis. Here’s an excerpt:
I normally write big long statements about pieces like
this, about what I was trying to say and whatnot. But this time I’m not.
I’m interested in what, if anything, people take from it. I will say
it’s a story about not being ok, and trying to be. Some of this vid is
about ideas I think about a lot, and some of it is more directly about
my own life. I guess everything anyone makes is like that.
And Tomas’ great song really pushed it in the direction in ended up
going. We were apparently mind-melded at some point last fall when all
of this was coming together, as I think the vid and the song comment on
each other nicely. I think. But I don’t know. That’s your call. Either
way, I am grateful to Tomas for trusting me with an open brief, and
allowing me to go nuts with the story and direction.
After 15 years apart, the Stone Roses regrouped in 2011 for a reunion many thought would never happen. By the next year, they were touring the world with renewed vigor, and the band continues to push on in its second life. In the new documentary The Stone Roses: Made of Stone, director Shane Meadows traces the band's history and reunion as the musicians prepared for a string of homecoming shows in Manchester last June.
As a fan, Meadows doesn't just focus on the present – he's also bringing the Stone Roses' storied past to light. Footage of the band's sudden rise and aggravated dissolution fill the backdrop of one of British rock's most massive reunions.
The Stone Roses: Made of Stone will premiere May 30th in Manchester, and opens June 5th in the U.K. and Ireland. So far there's no U.S. release scheduled.
Tegan And Sara had already proven they were able to take the lyric video to another level with their inky one for “Now I’m All Messed Up,”
but they’ve heightened it for “I Was A Fool.” The clip actually
features the band, as well as a young girl, perhaps portraying the fool,
as she wanders through a city. Directed by Travis Hopkins.
In case you weren’t entirely sure if Azealia Banks really gives a
fuck or not, here’s the video for her witchy, ferocious track “Yung
Rapunxel” which features Banks breaking champagne bottles on SWAT Team
Members’ riot masks. The Illuminati imagery is heavy in here, too,
replete with an owl flying in and out of Banks’s forehead. A good start
to the week for her, after capping-off last week’s attempt to tussle with A$AP Rocky.
The young Boise filmmaker Tyler T. Williams and the young Boise wonder-pop auteur Youth Lagoon have made some great videos together before, and now they’ve got another one. This one is for “Mute,” the excellent six-minute centerpiece of Youth Lagoon’s sophomore album Wondrous Bughouse, and it tells the story of a young skateboarding longhair who wanders into a Twilight Zone reality where nothing much makes sense. It’s a heavy video for a pretty song.
Youth Lagoon – “July” Video
Youth Lagoon – “Montana” Video
“Montana,” a song from the young Boise bedroom-rock auteur Youth
Lagoon, is a huge, surging tune, something that seems way too epic for a
kid to make on his own. And now director Tyler T. Williams
has given the song a rich, powerful narrative video, one that packs a
whole lot of emotional catharsis and tricky storytelling into its five
minutes.
Seriously, in the age of the fast-and-cheap internet music video,
it’s a rare thing to see anyone attempting a short film with this sort
of force, let alone pulling it off. We might need to bring back
Jessica’s old Best Videos Of The Week feature just so we can help clips
like this one get the props they deserve. It’s really something.
The video for Small Black’s “Free At Dawn” pays tribute to Brooklyn
by culling together a legion of images of different signage throughout
the borough all shot on 16mm film. It was directed by previous
collaborator Yoonah Park, who has also worked with Washed Out, Deerhoof,
and Vampire Weekend and is inspired by experimental filmmaker Hollis
Frampton.
Last week, the euphoric British dance greats Basement Jaxx returned with a new single called “Back 2 The Wild.”
Today, they’ve given us the track’s video. Basement Jaxx have a long
history of brain-wrecking music videos, and this one doesn’t disappoint;
it’s a frantic collage of kitschy jungle tropes, filtered through a
hyperactive color scheme, with enough strobe-flashing that it might need
an epilepsy warning. Mat Maitland and Natalia Stuyk direct.
We may not have figured out how to reconcile the continued existence of the Florida fuzz-pop band Surfer Blood after this, but Surfer Blood continue to be a band and to release music anyway. They’ve now dropped a video for their recent single “Demon Dance,”
and it might be a pretty fun video from most other bands, but just try
to watch it without stressing out. Frontman John Paul Pitts plays a
security guard who’s nice to a pretty lady in the first scene and who
then drifts off into dreams that have some weird gender shit going on —
Pitts making out with a mannequin version of that same pretty lady, etc.
Have fun making some sense of the video.
The sprightly British indie-pop Veronica Falls released their sophomore album Waiting For Something To Happen
a couple of months ago, and now they’ve made a video for its jangly,
spirited title track. The clip is a fast-paced vintage-film
black-and-white montage of cameras speeding through nature and band
members’ faces.
Moby and Mark Lanegan both do a ton of work with different artists,
but it’s still a bit of a surprise to see them working with each other.
The new Record Store Day single “The Lonely Night” has Lanegan’s dusky
vocals over a pretty downtempo track from Moby, and its new video, from
director Colin Rich, is all gorgeous California desert landscapes, shot in time-lapse.
According to director Hayley Morris, she made her video for “Joy,” a delicate song from Iron And Wine’s new album Ghost On Ghost,
by “projecting hand-painted water color animations into stop-motion
landscapes.” This sounds like an incredible amount of work! And in so
doing, she created a sense of fragile and otherworldly beauty that she
couldn’t have achieved if she hadn’t hand-made the whole thing.
When brainstorming ideas for possible narratives and
visual interpretations of the song I was drawn to a particular lyric.
“Deep inside the heart of this crazy mess I’m only calm when I get lost
within your wilderness.” This is what sparked my idea.
Joy is a song about love and taking a moment to realize how
someone can vastly change how you perceive yourself and the world around
you. My goal for this video was to make the viewer feel this sense of
joy, discovery and appreciation by following the organic flow of the
song as the landscape changes through bursts of color, growth and
transformation. Through his eyes we see how the woman Sam sings about
changes his world by catching glimpses of her within the different
plants, rocks, trees and objects that occupy the scenery/himself. In the
end we see that he is full of color and vibrancy.
The video is a mixed-media piece. It’s composed of a blend of
rotoscope watercolor animations and stop-motion. I hand made every piece
in the landscape from found objects, paper, clay and various materials,
and then projected her image into the set pieces. Each scene was shot
frame by frame with Dragon in my studio space in my apartment. It was nice rolling out of bed and ready for work!
On his Tumblr, Frank Ocean recently posted a video for “Lost,” one of
the most immediate and accessible songs from his 2012 masterwork Channel Orange.
The clip is a split-screen travelogue that follows Ocean through places
like Dubai, Paris, and Tokyo, and it works as a cool, calm, and
collected victory lap after an amazing year.
In a few weeks, the Louisville power trio Coliseum will release Sister Faith, their latest album of clangorous, hard-charging, metallic punk rock. The video for their anthemic “Bad Will,” for which director Max Moore,
in crisp black-and-white, documented an impromptu Coliseum show on the
sidewalk outside a Louisville tattoo parlor. The clip ends with
Louisville cops handcuffing the band members, and you can feel tension
growing throughout.
Twee Swedish disco siren Sally Shapiro’s video for “If It Doesn’t Rain,” a lovestruck thump from her new album Something Else, tells a love story about an animated snowflake boy and an animated regular girl. Iris B. Cegarra
is credited with editing the clip, putting it together with footage
from a 60-year-old cartoon by the Czech artist Zdeněk Miler.
Musician/ethnomusicologist/PhD student Julian Lynch released a whimsical and creepy video for his track “Gloves” off of the album Lines,
released last month. In the video — directed by Sarah Kinlaw — a girl
wakes up to find her decrepit stuffed rabbit doll staring at her. What
follows is a lot of half-comedic, half-ritualistic dancing, some gold
pixie dust, and an attempt to bring an inanimate friend back to life.
Justin Timberlake, along with Mavis Staples, Ben Harper, an others,
performed at the White House last night for an evening celebrating
Memphis soul music. Earlier in the day, he joined FLOTUS Michelle Obama
to teach a workshop called Soulsville USA: The History Of Memphis Soul,
where they taught the long lineage of the city’s music for middle and
high school students. The performances will air on PBS series In Performance At The White House on 4/16, but you can preview Timberlake’s rendition of Otis Redding tear-jerker “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay” .
Eleanor Friedberger has delivered the video Personal Best single “Stare At The Sun.” The clip features intermittent live shots, an ASL translator, and a very awesome dog. Director Scott Jacobson's bright, feel-good clip gives this solo cut
from the Fiery Furnaces' Friedberger the sign language treatment.
Watch the Video for James Blake's "Overgrown", Directed by Nabil
Nabil Elderkin, the filmmaking mastermind behind videos for everyone from Antony to Kanye, has shot a beautiful video for James Blake's "Overgrown" from the album of the same name.
It's a characteristically surreal nighttime trek through forests and
hills haunted with spirits (and a very meditative James Blake).
Between MS MR’s clip for “Hurricane”
yesterday and this, the Soft Moon’s video for “Want,” I’d like to
suggest to Tom that perhaps this week’s video wrap-up be about the most
unsettling visuals of the week instead of the best. “Want,” directed by
Grant Singer, is a skittering portrait of drug-addled transgression
after transgression after transgression. It does, however, line up
perfectly with the Soft Moon’s angular and jarring post-punk.
Today, the Knife release Shaking The Habitual, their dark and overwhelming new double album. And now they’ve teamed with director Marit Östberg, who also helmed their “Full Of Fire”
video, to make a 13-minute short film about the album. In the video,
the two siblings in the group take turns talking about the album, its
themes, and the ideas underpinning it in prewritten and intricately
plotted-out fashion, while Östberg flashes creepy non-sequitur images
onscreen. And if you’ve yet to take on the vast album, its music plays
constantly in the video, offering a relatively digestible starting
point.
In the video for Akron/Family’s “Until The Morning,”
member Miles Seaton functions as a bit of a storyteller. The
positioning of scenes of him sitting in a room, singing to no one, with
ones of furniture on fire and him in different, nearly catastrophic
locales feels as if he’s spinning a yarn expressly for you.
Paramore's video for 'Still Into You' from the self-titled album. Directed by Isaac Rentz
In their new video for "Still Into You," Paramore
tackle the age old question of what to do with free reign over an
ornate and totally empty mansion? Their take: Bike down the halls at top
speed, throw an impromptu ballet recital and set sail on a boat placed
in the middle of a room filled with balloons. Set to the sugar coated
pop-rock gem from their new self-titled album (out today), frontwoman
Hayley Williams – rocking a two-toned hairdo – leads her wheelie-popping
bandmates, Jeremy Davis and Taylor York, through a neon-streaked wild
rumpus, which culminates the only way it possibly could. Fireworks. Lots
and lots of fireworks.
Official promo video for Nine Stories' song 'Only She Knows'. Directed by Sergio Fernández Caro.
"A littleold-fashionedcomedy, betweenslapstickand farcesupposedlysophisticated, used to ridiculea cast of charactersranging fromrampantmillionairesandactuallybrimmingpathos", has confessedthe group.
NYC duo MS MR knocked weird out of the park for this video for
“Hurricane.” Heavy petting — if you’re at work right now, I don’t
necessarily recommend you hit play — begets a cascade of pastel spew,
one girl essentially bathes in heart-shaped sequins, and singer Lizzy
Plapinger is painted bright blue, but it’s her photo-print swimsuit that
really steals the show, in that it looks like she does in fact have a
face on her stomach.
“Imagine It Was Us”
is a clubby new track from the great British soul singer Jessie Ware,
one of the two bonus tracks from the new American edition of her debut
album Devotion. And in its new video, from director Kate Moross,
Ware gets to play disco queen in an ’80s-style vogue club. It’s maybe
the most visually slick thing we’ve yet seen from Ware, and she looks
like she’s having fun.
Johnny Jewel of Glass Candy and Chromatics also makes music with Symmetry, a project that released Themes For An Imaginary Film in 2011. Now Symmetry has released a video for the closing track from
that record, “Streets of Fire.” The video is full of footage show around
New York City, and was directed by Alastair Uhlig.
Becky Stark a/k/a Lavender Diamond released a new record last year, Incorruptible Heart, her first since 2007. Back in September, we showed you the video
for “Everybody’s Heart’s Breaking Now.” Now, check out a new video for
“I Don’t Recall,” the album’s third track, directed by Jena Malone.
Below, check out the video as well as what the director had to say about
it.
Director Jena Malone told MTV Buzzworthy:
This video was inspired by a painting I’ve been obsessed
with for years. It’s called “Christina’s World ” by Andrew Wyeth. As an
actor I love using painting and photographs when I’m in the beginning
stages of developing a character. And Andrew Wyeth is an artist I seem
to always come back to again and again. No one can touch how we sees
women. His mood and tone are so raw and personal but heart achingly
beautiful. In the painting a young woman is laying in a field looking
back at a farmhouse. But it’s her body language which is the most
impactful. It looks like she has been crawling or has fallen in the
dirt. Her body language plays between that wonderful balance of longing
and acceptance of one’s fate. And when I listened to the song, I felt it
spoke of similar things. Instantly I knew that I wanted set a
lighthearted, humorous as you say, tone to play into the therapeutic
aspect of dealing with a broken heart. While exploring her own private
female disasters.
Robin Thicke – “Blurred Lines” (Feat. T.I. & Pharrell) (NSFW) (Dir. Diane Martel)
Late pass on this one, but T.I.’s old-man dancing is probably the
greatest thing that has ever happened. The secret to getting famous
rappers to loosen up on camera, it turns out, is to cast them in Benny
Hill soft porn with naked models. Good to know!
The human wonder Colin Stetson creates abstract alternate universes
while using only his gigantic saxophone. And in a new video for “In
Mirrors” and “And In Truth,” two of the tracks from Stetson’s new album New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light, three different directors have given his music images to match. For the Stetson solo track “In Mirrors” Kurtis Hough
has made a nonrepresentational snowy kaleidoscope. And for “And In
Truth,” a collaboration with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, directors Dan Huiting and Tabb Firchau have paired the music with gorgeously swooping hi-def remote-mountain landscape-shots.
The song’s official music video is a grand and sweeping thing, but now Phoenix have posted a very different video for “Entertainment,” the first single from their forthcoming Bankrupt!
album. This one is a stripped-down performance video, with the band
playing an acoustic-guitar/keyboard version of the song not too
different from the one they did on QTV last week. As a possible nod to
the video’s low-tech status, they use a green screen to put themselves
in front of the Palace of Versailles, France’s most enduring symbol of
misguided wealth and splendor.
The Besnard Lakes teach us that taking candy from strangers can occasionally turn out great in their trippy video for the recent single
“People Of The Sticks.” The video depicts a practicing gymnast who eats
candies with the band members’ faces on them, then proceeds to lose her
grip on reality while performing. The video flows thought moments that
are peaceful, creepy, and rather pretty, all in a wonderfully fluid way.
Also, the less said about the terrifying, maniacally laughing guy with
the red beard the better. Check it out below, and stream the band’s new album on Pitchfork.
Junip, the trio that José González leads when he’s not making music
on his own, are gearing up to release their self-titled sophomore album,
and they’ve already given us the icy, disturbing, very Scandinavian
video for “Line Of Fire.” Their new video, for rubber-grooving second single “Your Life, Your Call” is a sequel of sorts, with director Mikel Cee Karlsson
and a few of the last video’s characters returning to tell the story of
a chilly, ooky love triangle.
“Manhattan” is an absolutely gorgeous wafting cloud of a song from Cat Power’s excellent 2012 album Sun,
and it brand-new video effectively works as a love letter to the
titular island. In the clip, which Chan Marshall co-directed herself
alongside Greg Hunt, Marshall
dances her way through town — floating over bridges on the back of a
flatbed truck, drinks at Max Fish, hangs out with subway buskers. She
doesn’t crush anyone at chess at the Washington Square Park tables, but
if she’d done it, it wouldn’t have been out of place. This is a
wonderful music video, and if you are not currently in New York, it will
make you wish you were there.
The strummy, Stonesy, gospel-inflected “It’s Alright, It’s OK”
is the best new Primal Scream song in many years, and its new video,
from directors Douglas Hart and Ben Crook really runs with the whole
retro thing, mixing black-and-white footage of the band playing with
ancient B-roll images from a Vietnam-era city street. The guys in Primal
Scream even have era-appropriate haircuts and costumes.
Yesterday, the L.A. post-punk duo Bleached (formerly of Mika Miko) released their debut LP Ride Your Heart. “Dazed” is the unapologetic, unrefined pop-punk B-side of their 2011 7″ Francis. Unlike the carefully crafted narrative presented in the “Next Stop”
video, “Dazed” reflects Bleached’s early grungy aesthetic. The shaky
camera work and gritty color filters complement voyeuristic,
Warhol-esque subject matter — a faceless girl dances solo for a man
toting a super-8 camera. Her spastic, manic dancing suits the whopping
1:26 run time.
Devon Welsh — otherwise known as Majical Cloudz — released a haunting video for “Childhood’s End,” the morose and disturbingly catchy ballad off of his forthcoming album, Impersonator. We’ve seen Emily Kai Bock’s gorgeous work
before, and her direction of “Childhood’s End” is no exception.
Scattered scenes are artfully pieced together in order to create a
gloomy narrative set in mid-20th century suburbia. The lonely man
depicted in the video is the actor Kenneth Welsh (another Twin Peaks star)
who happens to be Majical Cloudz’s father. His performance makes the
shudder-inducing inaugural lyrics — “Your father, he is dead/I see him
in my head” — all the more chilling. That being said, it’s hard to look
away.
We already know the L.A.-via-Berlin-via-Brooklyn experimental band Liars makes some pretty cool music videos.
Their latest is an exercise in geometrics. Intersecting lines vibrate
across the screen and merge together in order to create 3-D renderings
of the band members. I guess this is what designing a hologram looks
like? The accompanying track, “The Exact Color Of Doubt,” off last
year’s WIXIW is awash in glorious ambient synth chords and lilting vocals.
Teaming up with director Ian Pons Jewell and his crew at Studio Murmur, Landshapes premiere their new video for "In Limbo."
Landshapes and Noisey team up in Bolivia, and the result is this rather interesting video whose protagonist is a cholita, a female wrestler!
Landshapes produce 'wonky pop', quite pleasant to the ears. "In Limbo" is the first single taken from their upcoming debut album "Rambutan".
In regards to Noisey, we like the whole concept of shooting videos from around the globe.
"In Limbo, with its stunning video, proves a triumphant
opening salvo. “It’s always felt like a fighting song both musically and
lyrically” says Luisa Gerstein. With images of Bolivia’s Cholita female
wrestlers proving a major stimulus whilst recording, Luisa sought them
out, traveling to La Paz and teaming up with director Ian Pons Jewell.
The resulting film is a dignified response to a “Latin American society
where being both indigenous and a woman is a double sub-class” – a
celebration of these extraordinary women both in and out of the
wrestling ring." (Introducing: Landshapes. New album ‘Rambutan’)
Charli XCX just shared the clip for her True Romance track "What I Like". Directed by Ryan Andrews,
it flips the lyric, "your t-shirt's on my floor/yeah, we're undressing
in my house again" into something much more friendship-oriented. Behold
Charli's slumber party, complete with a dog, pizza, jumping on a bed,
and hanging out in a bathtub.
Music created for the film, Sound City. http://soundcitymovie.com
From the album Sound City - Real to Reel.
Dave Grohl had a blast directing his documentary Sound City
and performing with his Sound City Players ensemble – but in this
exclusive video, the rocker gets serious while writing and recording
"Mantra" at his Studio 606 space. Grohl takes control on the drums,
starting off focused and somber and unleashing his headbanging fury as
the track builds steam. Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme provides the driving bassline while Nine Inch Nails'
Trent Reznor creates a swirling vertigo of piano. The trio's chemistry
is impeccable as they journey through the almost eight-minute track
without a word.
Director Ferry Gouw‘s video for James Blake’s introspective and beat-driven new single “Voyeur”
starts with a CGI needle dropping on a CGI 12″, zooming in on it until
the grooves become their own trippy geometric universe. It’s a shame
MTV2 doesn’t show the psychedelic rave-video block Amp anymore, since this one would be perfect for it.
“Berlin Lovers,”
the breathy and inward synthpop jam from the British duo Still Corners,
now has a video that mirrors the song’s lazy beauty. The clip takes
place in an unstuck-in-time roller-skating rink, and it tells the story
of two teenagers who find love on the dance floor, as both members of
Still Corners look on approvingly. Christian Sorensen Hansen
directs, keeping a gorgeously naturalistic tone until he lets a few
fantastical elements creep in at the end.
"Gigante" is the second music video "Small Disorders unimportant". Made
by Julio de la Rosa and Marina Guilarte, is almost the reverse of the
previous video, the "common Curses" with the domestic environment and
aggressiveness replaced here by the stunning scenery of Lanzarote and
the protective embrace of the couple. Two
of the faces of those multiple disorders without importance of speaking
the songs: in this case, the declaration of a sociopath love a girl
with a condition dependent. There is nothing.
You know America’s gun epidemic has gotten out of control when motherfucking Snoop Doggy Dogg makes a stop-the-madness video. “No Guns Allowed,”
Snoop’s new peace anthem under his quasi-Rasta Snoop Lion guise, has a
new video that cuts between elegiac black-and-white performance footage
of Snoop, as well as guests Drake and his daughter Cori B., and images
of recent gun tragedies. Jessy Terrero directs.
“Slow It Down”
is the new single from the human R&B song factory The-Dream, and
it’s about how everyone should stop making fired-up top-40 EDM and make
some slower, sexier songs instead. So naturally, the video isn’t about
any of that stuff; it’s a narrative thing packed with ’50s signifiers
and romantic longing and ass-shots. It also has Fabolous casually
tossing a football around onstage, like a secondary character on Happy Days or something. I really like it.
Sacramento-based producer Raleigh Moncrief (who worked as co-producer on Dirty Projectors’ breakout record Bitte Orca) just dropped Dusted,
a short-player featuring his sparse and cryptic tunes. “Reflect That”
and “First Person” are two of the tracks from the EP and lined-up
together for this dual video starring a workhorse make for a beautifully
unsettling piece of art.
Yesterday was Sub Pop’s 25th birthday. In some respects, it’s hard to
believe it’s only been 25 years. By way of comparison, Saddle Creek
Records will turn 20 this year, and as far as my cultural awareness is
concerned, Saddle Creek still seems like a relatively new entity, while
Sub Pop feels like it’s been with us since Biblical times.
That’s partly because the history of indie rock and the history of
Sub Pop are inextricably connected; the genre as we know it literally
would not exist without the label. (It’s probably not crazy to suggest
that without Sub Pop, Saddle Creek and labels of its ilk would never
have been born.) It’s also because Sub Pop’s legacy is so impossibly
multifaceted: The label is immediately associated with grunge, of
course, but it has also been the home and launching pad of seminal works
— vital debuts and/or classic albums, not late-career vanity projects —
from Wolf Parade, the Shins, Afghan Whigs, Fleet Foxes, Sunny Day Real
Estate, Sebadoh, Band Of Horses, the Postal Service … And even that
really just scratches the surface. I’m not telling you anything you
don’t know, but it’s maybe not something you think about all the time,
and now’s not a bad time to give it some thought.
Mudhoney was one of the label’s most significant signings. History has mostly erased this ages-old detritus by now, but before Nevermind,
Mudhoney was widely considered to be the band most likely to break out
of the Seattle scene. For a variety of reasons, Mudhoney wound up left
behind by not only Nirvana, but Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, and Pearl
Jam (and to a lesser extent, poseurs like Candlebox). That’s probably
because some of the same things that made Mudhoney exciting to locals —
they were hip, detached, sly, self-effacing — caused them to fly over
the heads of radio programmers and mainstream listeners who had embraced
grunge largely because it at least appeared to be (and very often was
indeed) bombastic, emotional music. None of this is to say Mudhoney are
the victims of some criminal cultural oversight, just that their
presence in Seattle and specifically at Sub Pop, in its early stages,
was vital. In many ways, they helped to give the city, the scene, and
the label an identity before international media were able to do so.
Anyway, it’s kind of fitting that Mudhoney are releasing a new video today, the day after Sub Pop’s 25th. “I Like It Small” will appear on the band’s forthcoming ninth album, Vanishing Point,
their sixth for Sub Pop (their middle three were released by Reprise, a
result of the major-label boom that scooped up every Seattle band in
the post-Nevermind landscape). As far as I can tell, the song
is a comment on the band’s limited commercial viability. That kind of
meta commentary has been a force in Mudhoney’s arsenal since
“Overblown,” their snide contribution to 1992′s scene-defining Singles soundtrack . But beyond the well-trod-yet-timeless subject matter,
Mudhoney’s music still sounds urgent and invigorated, considerably more
so than the new material being released by any of the bands with whom
Mudhoney was associated two decades ago (and counting). They still look
pretty great, too.
The Flaming Lips have a new album called The Terror
coming out this month, so of course this was a great morning to release
a video for a song from their last album, the Bon Iver collab “Ashes In The Air” from last year’s all-collabs effort The Flaming Lips And Heady Fwends. And I don’t know how many multinational corporations are going to hire Wayne Coyne to appear in their commercials after this
one. The clip tells the inspirational story of a spaceman with a
Residents-esque glowing psychedelic eyeball head who (spoiler alert)
murders a baby by feeding it through a meat grinder. Also, the baby has a
singing grown-up’s face projected on its own face. The video also stars
a bunch of ripped-open naked people and exposed brain matter. It’s not
remotely safe for work, and I can’t really imagine any situation in
which anybody might want to watch it. But if this sounds like the sort
of thing that you need to experience on a Tuesday morning, go nuts
below.
Drake’s already given us the cartoonish, ridiculous video for “Started From The Bottom,” the first single from his forthcoming album Nothing Was The Same. Now he’s got another one for the only other song we’ve heard from the LP, the seething rant “5AM In Toronto.”
This one is a stripped-back, atmosphere-heavy one. We see Drake lurking
in a freezing, remote outdoor cityscape and prowling a blue-lit
strip-club, puffing blunts and generally not doing much. It’s the sort
of video that gets over almost entirely on Drake’s personal charisma,
which abounds.
In this new video for “Now Is Not The Time,” a gracefully gleaming song from their debut EP Recover,
the Scottish synthpop trio Chvrches play the track while standing at
the center of a gorgeously lit warehouse roller-disco. As roller-disco
indie rock videos go, this one isn’t coming close to the Rapture’s “Get Myself Into It,” but it’s awfully pretty regardless.
inc. – “Black Wings” (Dir. Andrew/Daniel/Ryan Kuhlman)
It’s entirely possible that I’m only mentioning this because Spring Breakers
has not yet let up its vice-grip on my brain, but this video reminds me
of early Harmony Korine — of the very Harmony Korine idea,
specifically, that the apocalypse is happening right now and that it looks like a high-fashion magazine advertisement. The makers of this video managed to make a farm, of all places, look like the coolest and saddest location on earth at the same time, and respect is due.
“IFHY” is one of a couple of romantic-obsession songs from Tyler, The Creator’s depressing trudge of a new album Wolf,
and the subject matter is not exactly new material for that guy. But
the new video, which Tyler directed under his Wolf Haley alias, is
something different, and creepy, and disturbing. Tyler, wearing an Elephant Man-looking
makeup job that makes him look like an evil Frankenstein-doll version
of himself, harasses a fellow living doll in a gigantic dollhouse.
Pharrell, who sings on the track, does not appear in the video, but at
the end, the song turns into a brief mini-video for the Hodgy Beats
collab “Jamba,” and Hodgy does show up. The video is an ambitious
technical achievement, but it doesn’t make me like the song on the album
any more. Your mileage may, however, vary.
An exclusive extended cut of the latest single from the album, Gossamer,
featuring almost two minutes of additional intro footage to see the
whole story.
