Earlier this year, Ducktails, the Real Estate side project led by
guitarist Matt Mondanile, released the sunny and extremely likable LP The Flower Lane,
which worked as a kind of album-length tribute to the lush indie-pop
that was coming out of New Zealand in the ’80s. The new video for the
Flower Lane song “Under Cover” plays out as an extended dream sequence,
with Mondanile imagining himself and his friends and bandmates out of
grimy-ass Greenpoint and into some green and bucolic location, the sort
of place where they can enjoy dominoes and badminton in peace. Charles
Poekel directs.
Last week, A-Trak and Armand Van Helden-duo Duck Sauce returned with zippy track “It’s You.”
For its visual treatment, they’ve brought the song’s barbershop quarter
sonics to life, quite literally. Not only do the two play barbers in
the video, but many of the hairstyles come to life via animation to sing
along and move to the song.
Slander have perfected the seedy motel room video. Their clip for “Magnets/Ghosts”
was a display of ascendant eeriness. This time around, they ditch
black-and-white and opt to use a similar dingy locale for something a
little saucier, splicing select scenes of salaciousness with ones of the
band playing a sunny outdoor set. Serena
Reynolds-directed clip.
“Ratchet,”
It’s a solid new song that is equal parts dance and post-punk
(dance…punk? Could such a combination even be possible?!) and it comes
with a pretty strange music video. If you’re a dedicated fan, you may
initially be confused because the video for “Ratchet” is exactly the
same as “Octopus.”
The only difference being that while “Octopus” became a little bizarre
after the opening shot of drummer Matt Tong, this new one becomes
absolutely deranged. What starts out with the band playing normally
quick mutates into a strange glitchy display as Kele Okereke grows
multiple heads, until eventually the band becomes one ever expanding
fractal.
"Will you love me now that I can dance?" This surreal clip from director
Chis Ando (Talbot Tagora) is the first video for Total, the debut album
by Portland four-piece Hausu.
Directed by Chris Ando
Edited by Chris Ando
Starring Dr. Patrick Atadeh
Here's the video for the Weeknd's new single "Kiss Land",
a heavily processed visual that picks up on where the pornographic
single art left off, finding Abel Tesfaye thinking aloud in a den of
iniquity.
When Abel Tesfaye, bka the Weeknd, dropped “Kiss Land”
earlier this year, Amrit astutely pointed out markers of Tesfaye’s
growth embedded into the track via a lighter, more celebratory touch in
both the sound and the lyrics. But something else that is worth noting
is that for anyone whose interests stretch throughout the blogosphere
and heard something familiar with this tune, it’s unlikely your ears
were deceiving you. Brooklyn producer Silky Johnson had a hand in
crafting the track and its backbone can originally be heard on Main
Attrakionz’s “Nothin Gonna Change.”
The video version is slightly more lush than the original, but it
doesn’t seem to be a case of foul play, anyway. Scratch that. There’s
always foul play when it comes to the Weeknd, but only in his propensity
for lustful deviance. And while the whole clip is shot to look like
you’re watching fuzzy security camera tapes, it is still a bit unsafe
for work.
Watch the video for the Weeknd's collaboration with Wiz Khalifa, "Remember You":
David Wingo is a film composer, and Explosions In The Sky are a Texan instrumental post-rock band with a little film-scoring experience of their own. Wingo and EITS got together to score Prince Avalanche,
a forthcoming Paul Rudd/Emile Hirsch indie comedy from director David
Gordon Green. The video for “Wading,” a short two-minute piece of music
from the movie, is a haunting image of trees trembling in time-lapse
wind.
Earlier this month, the former chillwaver Washed Out shared “It Feels All Right,” the lush and languorous first single from his forthcoming sophomore album Paracosm,
as a flower-filled lyric video. Today, he’s done the same for “Don’t
Give Up,” the album’s second single. And like “It Feels All Right,” this
one feels like evidence of a stylistic shift, away from gently awed New
Order-esque synthpop and toward the sort of rippling acid-head beach
party that could only happen in our collective dreams. Check the
song, and its lyric video.
Last week, M.I.A. shared her rave-damaged new single “Bring The Noize,”
this morning, she’s dropped the video, in which she looks absolutely
glorious and tough as hell while flexing bright-pink hair and some
seriously done-up nails. The clip seems to take place at the sort of
London underground rave where everyone wears spotless white clothes and
treats the dry ice rising from the ground like it’s some sort of healing
balm. Like just about every M.I.A. video, it’s an intense and
overwhelming piece of work, and like just about all of them, it’s pretty
great.
As black metal evolves into newer and weirder sonic and thematic
terrains, Sweden’s fearsome and amazing Watain continue to toil in the
same poisoned ground from which the music first grew. The band offers
swirling, suffocating, hook-driven black metal that draws from the very
best in the genre’s history — Dissection, Immortal, Morbid Angel — with
lyrics focusing on rituals, witches, devils, and demons. (Euronymous
would surely approve.) They’ve become sort of infamous for their stage
show — which involves animal carcasses and stinks to high heaven (er,
low hell?) — but that infamy has overshadowed their songwriting, which
uses classic elements to achieve astonishing results. Beneath the
corpsepaint, Watain are meticulous craftsmen; their structural
perfectionism seems almost uniquely Swedish. Their fifth LP, The Wild Hunt,
is their biggest and most ambitious, even including two songs with
clean singing (they sound a bit like late-period Bathory). First single
“All That May Bleed,” though, is searing, blood-raising Scandinavian
black metal. Of course it’s great.
Patrick Daughters has directed a lot of great videos, but he’ll probably always be most famous for helming the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ iconic “Maps”
clip. So it’s fitting that Daughters has once again linked with the
YYYs, directing the video for their giddily emotive ode to friendship
“Despair.” If Mosquito,
the band’s very good new album, has a “Maps,” it’s “Despair.” And in
making the clip, the YYYs have become the first band to film a music
video on top of the Empire State Building. The video is framed as a
drunken barroom reverie from Karen O, but once the band reaches the
building’s summit, it’s a total endorphin rush of a visual, with Karen
pinwheeling all over the observation deck and her two bandmates
generally looking awed by everything around them. If you can watch this
video without goosebumps, you are going about your life wrong.
Until now, all the videos for tracks from Settle,
the great debut album from the brotherly British dance duo Disclosure,
have been excellently fantastical affairs that mostly haven’t featured
the group themselves. They had a cameo in their “You & Me” clip, but they were entirely absent in their “White Noise” and “When A Fire Starts To Burn” videos. That all changes with the new “F For You”
clip. Disclosure’s own Howard Lawrence sings the track, and the video
is a kinetic performance clip, showing both Lawrence brothers at their
futuristic-looking controls, shot on a soundstage that’s like like a
spacecraft from a trippy sci-fi movie. Ben Murray and Ross McDowell
direct.
Earlier this year, LA’s Bleached released a great full-length debut, Ride Your Heart.
We’ve already seen a video for “Next Stop,” now here’s the band’s
prismacolor visualization of their hook-heavy single “Dead In Your
Head.”
Three years ago, Robyn released the mini-album Body Talk, Pt. 2, which included the ridiculously catchy Snoop Dogg collab “U Should Know Better.”
Three years later, she’s made a video for the song. Why? It doesn’t
matter why! She’s Robyn! She does what she wants! More to the point:
Holy shit, this song still kicks so many different varieties of ass. The
video features young gender-flipped British lookalikes of both Robyn
and Snoop, neither of whom really looks that much like Robyn or Snoop.
It is a fun, cartoonishly surreal affair, and you can watch.
The video for their new song “In Days Of Woe” mostly consists of
not-that-exciting studio footage, and it seems to exist just to prove
that they record their shit live to tape (which, to be fair, is cool). But man oh man, those riffs!
The Weeknd makes mournfully beautiful music about being overly
self-medicated and having too much sex. Juicy J makes triumphantly
thunderous music about being overly self-medicated and having too much
sex. The two make a surprisingly seamless pair on Juicy’s single “One Of Those Nights.”
And in its violent new video, Juicy and Abel Tesfaye both get to
exhibit psychotic levels of cool during a nightclub armed robbery.
Punk weirdos Wavves release another oddball clip with “That’s On Me.” This one is way less trippy than “Afraid Of Heights,”
but still contains multitudes of absurdity. Whether it’s a suit seeking
stress-relief via slicing up soda bottles or parody metal dude standing
in for Nathan Williams, the video is filled with quirk.
In 2012, rap-weirdo legend DOOM teamed up with the quirky producer
Jneiro Jarel to form the short-lived duo JJ DOOM and released the album Keys To The Kuffs.
Nearly a year later, they’ve made a video for the album track
“Bookhead,” and it shows DOOM going through a Kafka-style metamorphosis,
joining forces with a bodega security mirror to become a human fisheye
lens. He then goes shopping for used books. The street artist Steve “ESPO” Powers directed the video.
Tree just shared his video for the honking, soul-thundering mixtape
track “Busters” this morning, but he must’ve taped it months ago, when
Chicago was still frozen tundra. There are not too many things that look
cooler than one guy rapping his heart out in the snow. Watch it below.
The face-ripping Canadian post-hardcore power trio METZ released
their awesomely punishing self-titled debut last year, and now their Sub Pop
labelmate Chad VanGaalen has directed them a video for the surging,
anthemic “Get Off,” one of that album’s standouts. It’s gross, nutso Heavy Metal-style
animated comic-book surrealism, and it tells us of the fate of an alien
dolphin-dog creature.
Arctic Monkeys apparently haven’t gotten that whole stoner-rock thing
out of their system yet. “Do I Wanna Know?,” the band’s new single,
rides a souped-up fuzz-rock riff, and it seems custom-designed for
high-school parking-lot bong-rip sessions. The band shared the new song
this morning, pairing it with a lightly psychedelic animated video that
features lots of wav-forms and almost-naked cartoon women.
The where-does-that-other-sock-go mystery has been solved in the video for the Postal Service’s “A Tattered Line Of String.” In the clip for the Give Up anniversary edition bonus track, we venture into the dirty
clothes-filled alternate universe of an otherwise standard issue
laundromat.
The Daniel Portrait of Kamp Grizzly-directed video for Local Natives’
“You & I” is truly upsetting until the last twenty seconds. Puppy
enthusiasts be forewarned: This clip takes place in a future where dogs
become extinct. Fortunately, in this terrible future there are also dog
detectives (not like Wishbone, who is a dog that is also a detective,
but actual human people who sleuth to find pups) and there is hope!
Last month, Brooklyn’s Small Black released Limits Of Desire, an absolutely lovely album of starstruck small-stakes synthpop. Today, they drop a video for “No Stranger,”
one of its highlights. The clip tells the story of a dude who sees a
girl on a train, thinks about talking to her, chickens out, and then
imagines how things might’ve turned out differently if he’d taken the
leap. I feel for you, guy in the video. It’s a completely gorgeous and
romantic piece of work, with a few vaguely NSFW bits; Mandy Mandelstein and Addison Mehr directed it.
Sonny & The Sunsets have delivered a quirky animated video for
their track “Green Blood.” The tune comes from their most recent album, Antenna To The Afterworld,
which is about space and death, but here they explore interplanetary
romance. Watch for the Crystal Pepsi reference.
If you ever wanted to see Yolandi from Die Antwoord pee her pants,
now is your opportunity with their new video for “Cookie Thumper.” This
is the least troubling part of the whole thing, as the song is seemingly
about being victimized by a recently-freed-from-jail drug dealer. I
guess it’s better than black face? Major trigger warning.
Foals last worked with director Nabil Elderkin on the seriously NSFW “Late Night”
video. The band and director are paired up again for the “Bad Habit”
clip, which is about as objectionable as the sleeve art for Rush’s Hemispheres. But a tasteful nude is still a nude, so be warned. “Bad Habit” is far and away my favorite track on Foals’ recent album, Holy Fire.
It’s a rich, beautiful electro ballad with soaring climaxes and
thousands of perfectly arranged near-microscopic details. It’s a song
that I usually play three or four times in a row every time I listen to
it, because its chorus gives me such an endorphin charge. Nabil (whose video portfolio includes Kanye West, Justin Timberlake, and Bon Iver, among others)
gives the vid a vast, painterly feel, which is absolutely warranted by
the music.
If you can wrap your mind around the idea that there’s a fucking band
called Twin Peaks now, then you can hear that the Chicago teenagers who
make up the band Twin Peaks make a confident old-school indie rock chug
that should be beyond their years. We’ve already posted their song “Stand In The Sand,” and now we’ve got the video for “Fast Eddie,” in which director Ryan Ohm follows the band as they go lamping on a Lake Michigan beach. Spoiler
alert: Nobody finds Laura Palmer’s body wrapped in plastic.
Filmed, Edited and Directed by Andrew Hung
Choreography and Dance by Jacqueline Mitchell
Hair, Make-Up and Styling by Alison McLaughlin
Lighting by Niall Hannell
Yale alumni San Fermin craft family drama with their video for
“Sonsick.” The chamber-pop track sounds easy-breezy, but the lyrics are
just as heavy as the visuals. You feel the emotional pull from singers
Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe (of band Lucius), especially in the
multi-layered hook. Check it out below and purchase here.
The Gary, Indiana tough guy Freddie Gibbs is back on the rap
underground after a stint on Young Jeezy’s CTE label. His new album ESGN arrives next month, and we’ve already posted the Problem collab “One Eighty Seven.” Now Gibbs has released the John Colombo-directed video for the hard-minded, hoarse ESGN track “Eastside Moonwalker.” It’s pretty much just low-budget rap-video posturing, but Freddie Gibbs is really good at low-budget rap-video posturing.
We’ve been playing the hell out Kylesa’s new record, Ultraviolet, around here. “Unspoken”
was the first track to premiere from the album, and it’s absolutely one
of the record’s highlights, and now it’s got a video. It’s an animated
clip, directed by Brodie Rush and illustrated by Tyson Schroeder; it’s
bleak and dark and fiery, and the images of dreamlike apocalypse nicely
match the churning downtuned guitars and climactic vocal rushes.
Black Up, the first full-length from Seattle art-rap enigmas
Shabazz Palaces, is two years old now, but they’ve only just released a
video for the album track “An Echo From The Hosts That Profess
Infinitum.” The stark black-and-white clip, from director Joris Grelet,
stars a pair of stylish masked ninja figures, guys who wield katanas and
molotov cocktails and who dress with more flair than anyone you know.
Earlier this year, Western Mass trio Young Adults released a new EP, Born In ’91, a noisy punk album full of shoegaze guitars and shout-a-long hooks. Now, the band has a video for the EP’s third cut, “Spectre,” produced by Loroto.
It’s a cheeky commentary on stale office culture, corporate branding,
the numbness induced by social media, and general societal constructs
regarding success and normalcy.
“Open Eyes” is a song by Quilt that appears on the A-side of the band’s recent split with MMOSS, New Hampshire Freaks.
Below, watch a new video for the song. It was shot on 16mm film, and
plays with lightness and darkness in striking ways. The “Open Eyes”
video was directed by Kim and Luis Arnias. The duo also directed Quilt’s video
for “Young Gold,” from their 2011 debut for Mexican Summer. Quilt just
recorded a second record in Brooklyn, which is very exciting.
Will Sheff, frontman for literate Texan indie band Okkervil River,
has lately been busying himself with the DIY synthpop project Lovestreams, but his main band comes roaring back in a couple of months with a new album called The Silver Gymnasium.
This morning, we get to hear our first taste of the album: A
slow-building, piano-led track called “It Was My Season.” The lyric
video for the song shows a lady turning on an old projector in a dusty
auditorium somewhere, and you can watch it and hear the song.
The Glasgow synthpop trio Chvrches made a name for themselves earlier this year with their Recover EP and with its ridiculously catchy title track. And now they’ve announced plans to release their debut album The Bones Of What You Believe this fall. Their new video for “Gun,”
the similarly infectious first single from the album, turns the
standard band-performance video format into a dizzy kaleidoscope of
melting images.
“Fragment Two” is the slow, stately first single from ambitious British postpunkers These New Puritans’ new album Field Of Reeds,
and its new video seems fittingly epic. In the video, a camera pans
slowly across an imaginary landscape, one that includes mountains and
cathedrals and clifftops over gorgeous cityscapes, with the band
appearing and reappearing throughout. Daniel Askill directed the video, and it’s a Creators Project production.
Alongside Disclosure, the London space-soul duo AlunaGeorge helped make one of the year’s best singles in “White Noise,” and their own impending debut album Body Music has already yielded a few monster tracks of its own, like “Your Drums, Your Love” and “Attracting Flies.”
They’ve got a new video for the insinuating bass music slow-burner “You
Know You Like It,” and its video is an old-school sock-hop type of
thing, with the duo and their friends partying in an empty swimming
pool. It’s worth watching because it’s done with style and grace and
because the charisma of singer and beautiful human being Aluna Francis
carries it.
Low present new video from their recent album, the Jeff Tweedy-produced The Invisible Way. “Plastic Cup” opens The Invisible Way
— it’s a classic Low number, unhurried, dark, and warm, with Alan and
Mimi harmonizing sweetly. The Ryley Fogg-directed black-and-white clip
captures the band through a Golden Age-esque Vaseline-smeared lens, and
those images are intercut with fucking weird shots of anonymous folks in
elaborate white hoods, until the full scope of the narrative — and the
relationship between the two parties — is revealed.
Here's A-Trak's video for the Tuna Melt EP cut "Jumbo", featuring Galantis. It stars the producer as a one-man basketball team in a fun-house of a gym.
“Thousand Year Old Child” is a deeply pretty song from Crawling Up The Stairs, the new album by the gently expansive Austin fuzz-rock trio Pure X. And its new video, from director Malcolm Elijah,
works as a study of the deep lines on the face of Bob Olson, the
video’s lead actor. The beautifully shot black-and-white clip follows
Olson’s quick transition from haggard farmer to cabaret star, and it
finds Olson lip-syncing for helium-voiced Pure X frontman Nate Grace.
Regardless of media attention, though, Hooded Fang still like to keep
things weird. In their newest video, for the jangly, fuzz-rock Gravez
cut “Bye Bye Land,” a dance-off between rivaling gangs of young women
wearing animal masks quickly turns into a rather brutal fist fight. Two
particularly rowdy ladies battle to the blood; a ringleader in a chicken
mask reveals an alarming, mystical twist; and the whole thing looks a
little like the Ukraine circa 1981, except in Mexico. You’ll just have
to see what I mean.
I tend to associate Sacred Bones Records with spare, cold
post-punk/electronic/noise — Pharmakon, Vår, Lust For Youth, Cult Of
Youth … even Zola Jesus, really — but Arizona’s Destruction Unit don’t
quite fit that description, even though they do fit pretty nicely on the
Sacred Bones roster. Destruction Unit are basically a roots-based rock
band whose hook-heavy psychedelic songs are delivered through terrifying
feedback squalls and (presumably) several dozen cheap/broken effects
pedals. Their closest Sacred Bones analogue is probably the Men, which
especially makes sense, as Destruction Unit’s forthcoming Sacred Bones
debut, Deep Trip (which follows a handful of limited-run
releases), was recorded and mastered by a bunch of dudes also associated
with the Men, including that band’s bassist/vocalist, Ben Greenberg,
and their longtime engineers, Kyle Keays-Hagerman and Josh Bonati, along
with Kris Lapke of Hospital Productions (at least half of whose output
seems suited to Sacred Bones, too). Right now, Destruction Unit are out
on tour with Milk Music and Merchandise, which is a pretty incredible
bill, one of those things you’ll probably be bragging about having
attended (or wishing you had attended) in two or three years. Also prior
to the release of Deep Trip, Destruction Unit will drop a 7″ via the Suicide Squeeze Records Singles Series, called Two Strong Hits.
That record’s A-side, “Sonic Pearl,” has been paired with a video,
which we’ve got for you today. Not much happens in the “Sonic Pearl”
clip: A bunch of dudes wander around the wilderness, barely visible
through the warped-VHS-quality video and the blinding sun on the
horizon. But the visual component strongly reflects Destruction Unit’s
sound.
I hate looking at funny stuff in the office; I have no control when
it comes to laughing so it’s always really obvious when I’m surfing
Reddit or something. In that sense the Lonely Island’s new video is
torture to watch if you’re at work because it’s easily the funniest
thing to come from their new album.
The recently released “Go Kindergarten” stars Paul Rudd and Sean Combs
in a completely absurd ode to commanding club anthems. It appropriately
features Robyn, who has put out some of the finest club anthems of the last decade.
Claire mentioned how non-sequitur-heavy the new track is, and possibly the best thing
about the video is seeing every one of those insane things acted out
with complete dedication. The jokes fly by so fast that it’s impossible
to pick a favorite moment (I’m stuck somewhere between Combs teaching a
little girl arithmetic and Robyn eating the banana) and I’m sure you’ll
have a different one.
English trad-indie revivalists Yuck publicly parted ways
with frontman Daniel Blumberg in mid-April, and less than 10 days
later, Blumberg’s new solo project, Hebronix, released its excellent
first single, “Unreal.”
It remains to be seen what will be delivered by Yuck — who will indeed
carry on sans Blumberg — but either way, Hebronix seems poised to
satisfy fans of Blumberg’s old band. Hebronix’s debut album will (rather
appropriately) be produced by Royal Trux’s Neil Hagerty, and we’ve got
its second single now. “Viral” is a lilting, layered bit of summertime
pop full of baroque instrumentation and choral elements, yet driven by a
squealing electric guitar and Blumberg’s melancholy vocal; it feels
both familiar and fresh in equal measure — a formula accomplished to
wonderful effect on Yuck’s debut, too. The video, directed by Michael
Reich, stars Stacy Martin (Nymphomaniac) and Sonja Kinski.
You may remember Justin Vernon and Channy Leaneagh teaming up earlier this year for “Tiff,”
the first single off Poliça’s upcoming sophomore album. “Tiff” was
dark to begin with, but the newly released video is violently
disturbing. Featuring Leaneagh as both torturer and victim, the video
very bluntly –- almost clinically -– depicts her going through various
horrific procedures. Waterboarding, smashing fingers with a hammer,
heavy beatings; all are portrayed in graphic detail, as Leaneagh sings
lyrics such as, “Body buildings sickly fed/ Need my TV, I need my meds.”
Directors NABIL and Mike Piscitelli know what they’re doing and the
video is more than just shock value. In fact one of the most unsettling
things about the video comes before any of the violence; it’s all there
in the disorientingly narrow aspect ratio, which frames the entire
basement scene in a claustrophobic hysteria. Check it out if you’re
okay with the violent content.
Today, the sharp and fluid Houston rapper Fat Tony releases Smart Ass Black Boy, his new album, and he also gives us a video for the early single and album standout “Hood Party.”
The track’s two guest rappers, former Das Racist member Kool A.D. and
El-P associate Despot, both live in different places, and the video
comes up with a smart shortcut: It’s constructed as a Google Hangout,
with the three rappers and producer Tom Cruz checking in from various
different shindigs. Bonus points for the NBD Bun B cameo, and stick
around for the M. Night Shyamalan ending.
“La Chanson De Douche,” the first, francophonic single from Norwegian singer-songwriter-producer-composer Alexander Von Mehren and his forthcoming Aéropop LP. The track’s dapper, Serge-on-Stereolab lounge-fusion has a video
now, set in a golden ski-lodge type retreat, with footage of outdoors
lamping and indoors performing captured viaSuper 8 and Canon 5D, for a
nice mix of the halcyon and pristine.
With “Falling”
and now “Forever,” sisterly act Haim are on some other shit, nailing a
strain of soulful, syncopated, and clean LA studio pop with just the
right touch of fashion, finesse, and familial alchemy, and their fanbase
has grown by degrees wich each of those modifiers. This is a band we
can get behind, let alone one to watch,
in both pure musical and also pure visual terms. As such, last night on
Letterman was a proper showcase for their charms, and as such, they
charmed.
It’s been interesting watching the progression of the class of ’09
artists — including Washed Out, Toro Y Moi, and Neon Indian — lumped
together under the genre-tag that shall not be named™. Either that storm
got under their skin, or they were all coincidentally and
preternaturally mercurial, but in any event, they’ve proven the most
difficult to consistently label from release to release, let alone as an
aggregate group. Here then is young Washed Out’s newest guise, with “It
All Feels Right.” The artist born Ernest Greene has always had a way
with feelings,
but here he honeydips that sanguine sensitivity in overtly psychedelic
garb; that’s to say, Washed Out’s sound on “It All Feels Right” has more
in common with Tame Impala than hypnogogic anything, give or take a
flanged guitar. Not to put too fine a point on any of this, the single
comes to you via a lyrics video with kaleidoscopic flowers in bloom, and
all the quotes for any budding blog-hippie in need of a new ethos to
build around.
For the Adrian Buitenhuis-directed video for L.A. new wavers Kisses’ “Huddle,”
the duo adds a pint-size percussionist into the mix, who also seems to
function as the band’s voice of reason — at least for the sake of the
clip’s narrative. It utilizes an Off-To-College theme, where the band
expects to all stick together at community college instead of only
spending one more summer together and dispersing. Alas, someone in the
group has gotten accepted elsewhere and sorrow-ensues. The muted colors,
provided by Director Of Photography Ben Loeb, suit up with the song’s
somber tone and the murky storyline. Will Kisses make it to the fall?
The clip features mammoth smoke clouds and large-scale explosions
littering a metropolis in slow-motion. It’s as if they’ve been
decelerated, cooled down almost, by the song’s frosty synth blips and
spirit-like vocals, and the effect is chilling. “Hey, it’s a new summer/
Can we live there like it’s our last one?” begs vocalist Catherine
McCandless in the song’s hook – and if the video is any indication, it
looks like we will have to.
Angel Haze’s new single “No Bueno”
is, among other things, a furious display of fast-rap acumen. So credit
director Frank Borin with finding a long parade of goofballs willing
and able to lip-sync the entire song at the camera, pantomiming so hard
that nobody minds Angel Haze’s complete absence. The cast includes drag
performers, BDSM types, elderly white people, a cowboy couple, and at
least a couple of people willing to get so naked that YouTube has
already taken the video down. (There’s also a fair amount of white
people dropping N-bombs, so be warned.) But thanks to the good people at
Worldstar, you can still watch the NSFW video.
Last week, iconic director and musician David Lynch announced his new solo album, The Big Dream. The announcement included a stream of a collaboration with Swedish singer-songwriter Lykke Li, "I'm Waiting Here" (above). Now,
"I'm Waiting Here" has an accompanying video, which cruises a desert
road with as the sun goes down, turning dark along with the song. The
video was conceptualized by Lykke Li with artist Daniel Desure. .
Kurt Vile has already pulled off the near-impossibly feat of making a
Philadelphia accent sound cool, and now he seems determined to do the
same with the rest of his hometown. In director Tom Scharpling‘s new clip for “KV Crimes” — after “Never Run Away,” the second great video that Vile’s excellent new album Wakin On A Pretty Daze
has yielded — Vile parades through town in a plastic crown on a
cardboard Renn Faire throne. He bestows golden guitar picks upon little
kids and feasts on hoagies on silver platters, and he generally comes
off like his city’s new Fresh Prince.
Director Young Replicant‘s new video for “Fiction,” the spindly slow-burner from the xx’s Coexist,
is a visually ravishing black-and-white affair that finds Oliver Sim
moodily wandering through an expensive-looking hotel area, like Stephen
Dorff in Somewhere. First, he’s stepping over slumbering
bodies, those of his bandmates among them, in an indoor suite. Then,
he’s out in the woods for some intense swaying. Nothing much happens,
but it’s all very pretty and stylish.
Icelandic sprites Sigur Rós get uncharacteristically visceral on their new album Kveikur, and this morning, we get to see the video for that album’s title track. After “Brennisteinn,”
it’s the second track from the LP to get a video, and it’s honestly not
much of a video. Rather, the band has just shared the footage that’ll
project behind them at their live shows — blurry images from the British
Film Institute archive, which director Sarah Hopper has put together.
Mostly, it’s an opportunity to immerse yourself in the song’s studio
version, which sounds closer to White Pony-era Deftones than you probably ever imagined Sigur Rós could get.
Los Angeles’s financially beleaguered Museum of Contemporary Art seems to be pulling through,
at least on the endowment front, and the parting clouds of economic
hardship are dovetailing with this deft commission: MOCA had Mykki
Blanco make a video for “Initiation,” the second single from the Betty Rubble: The Initiation EP. Directed by Ninian Doff,
it features the always scenery-chewing performer as a CGI-enhanced
insect-man delving into the seedy underbelly of insect-man cage
matching. It’s a dystopian clip for a sinister song, and you can watch
it here.
Earlier this year, the former Das Racist rapper Kool A.D. released two solo mixtapes, 63 and 19, on the same day. And in the new Weird Days-directed video for the 19 track “Jaleel White” — named for the guy who played Urkel on Family
Matters — Kool A.D. does nothing but lie on a floor and blow vast clouds
of weed-smoke at the ceiling. That’s literally all he does. Sometimes
he’s double-exposed.
The latest of the Lonely Island’s comedy-rap Wack Wednesday offerings
is a solo showcase for group member Andy Samberg, who spends the entire
very short song spelling out his latest alter-ego. You’re going to want
a keyboard handy when you’re watching this one. It’s work! The end
result, though, is worth it. This is minor Lonely Island, but minor
Lonely Island is still well worth a couple of minutes of your time.
Last we saw Deerhoof, they were running around Japan in their video for “We Do Parties.” They’re absent from this clip, the Pieter Dirkx-directed,
dark visuals for their current album’s title(-ish) track “Breakup
Songs.” Instead, a plague doctor visits a town that is afflicted with
something that causes an array of rainbow-colored vomit. Fun! But this
physician, appropriately attired in a cloak and beak mask, turns
pestilence into a dance party.
In the video for Gauntlet Hair’s fluid “Human Nature,”
the band runs through their hometown Chicago, mostly through train
stations, as well as into some subtly wild house party scenarios. The
track is a fitting soundtrack for a montage of late night, possibly
troublesome, antics, so director Ryan Ohm’s visualization of the song is
spot-on.
A few years ago, the veteran Mobb Deep rapper Prodigy linked with the producer Alchemist to release Return Of The Mac,
a deeply excellent album of wizened soul-sampling New York tough talk.
Prodigy and Alchemist have once again linked for a new collaborative
album called Albert Einstein, and on the prettily slow-rolling
track “YNT,” they link with low-key Odd Future rapper Domo Genesis, who
released his own Alchemist-produced full-length No Idols last year. And in director Jonathan Andrade’s video for the track, P
and Domo dodge some ski-mask-clad female assassins.
Like the video for “In Your Eyes,” the visuals for Kate Boy’s “The Way We Are”
are shadowy, black-and-white, and feature lead singer Kate Akhurst
utilizing the minimalist dance moves. The arm-heavy choreography here
almost feels like slow motion, deconstructed voguing.
In the haunting new video
for the PEEP The aPROcalypse track “Like Water,” Steez’s group
pays him tribute, ascending a building in a bombed-out downtown BK to
paint a mural of Steez on the rooftop. Director Jonah Schwartz
imagines a post-armageddon version of the borough, CGI’ing its most
familiar landmarks into decay, and he finds real beauty in the rubble.
The video works as a pretty powerful eulogy.
Thirty Seconds To Mars performing "Up In The Air" the short film by Bartholomew Cubbins.
WARNING:
This video has been identified by Epilepsy Action to potentially
trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy. Viewer
discretion is advised.
Atoms For Peace are currently in rehearsals for a full band tour
beginning next month, and Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich have been sharing
video clips from them on YouTube. The latest features a performance of
UNKLE’s “Rabbit In Your Headlights,” for which Yorke provided vocals on
1998′s Psyence Fiction.
Vampire Weekend already got plenty of attention for “Diane Young,” the frantic first single from their truly great new album Modern Vampires Of The City, when they burned a couple of Saabs
in the lyric video. And now they’ve made a proper video for the song,
setting it at an anarchic dinner party and filling it with
indie-universe celebrities in cameo appearances. The party’s guest list
includes Santigold, Sky Ferreira, both members of Chromeo, Dirty
Projector Dave Longstreth, Walkmen frontman Hamilton Leithauser, Despot,
and quite possibly a couple of others I didn’t catch, as well as a
mysterious ski-mask-clad figure. Primo Khan directs, extending Vampire
Weekend’s unbroken streak of fun, energetic music videos.
This week, the sorta-lost genius hitmaker Terius Nash was in NYC to perform and celebrate the release of IV Play,
which is his fourth album and also a sex-pun because if y’all haven’t
heard, The-Dream is into sex! Consequently, “Pussy” is about the thing
you think it is, though its nonstop lubed-bikini-booty video is even
less SFW than you’d imagine. Take that into consideration when you watch
below, where you can also pull off a The-Dream video double-feature
thanks to the clip for his Jay-Z-featuring track “High Art.”
The title-track to TEEN’s Carolina
EP gets a video today, directed by and starring the performance
art/body expressionist Megha Barnabas. She also directed TEEN’s
outstanding “Electric” video (alongside Stand Clear Of The Closing Doors
filmmaker Sam Fleischner), so there is a strong history already, but
this one’s decidedly more Megha-centric. The results are, rosy: Flowers
decorate her dress and bundle in her arms as she visits NYC’s symbolic
sites and epicenters, offering blossoms to suits, coasting on
“Carolina”‘s kraut-laced reverie until a climactic psychedelic freakout
in Times Square, behind a sidewalk-strewn bouquet, in front of a backlit
US flag. Honestly, the only thing that’s weird about it is that more
people don’t have that reaction. It’s mesmerizing, symbolism abound.
At this point, whomever’s it is investing in Disclosure is obviously
well aware they have a special thing on their hands: two cute brothers
steeped in UK garage making emotional, sincere, artful — and in the case
of “When A Fire Starts To Burn,”
outright banger — dance music that is incredibly smart but never
suffers for it. They’re like what James Blake could have been, if he was
more interested in filling dance floors rather than making them think.
Also this is a good week for you if you like Disclosure, as the “When A
Fire” video is our sixth post on them since Monday. So all of those
things said, director Bo Mirosseni right with this clip, which is
replayable as Disclosure is repeatable: an enviably diverse congregation
sweats in an imagined church where the preacher morphs into the song’s
vocalist, and each congregant feels the spirit goofily enough to warrant
playbacks to focus on each. If Disclosure actually broke in the ’90s
instead of just sounding like it, they’d have tapped Spike Jonze for
this video.
Big year for Suede: The reunited Britpop icons dropped a new album Bloodsports. From the album is the track “Hit Me” for which the band has released a video full of museum-ravaging.
Zach Yudin’s Cayucas project pays tribute to an “East Coast Girl”
in the sunniest, most SoCal way. The track is bright and punchy, an odd
tone for a tune about subway rides in city that can be pretty dismal
for half of the year. Its video is equally colorful, with Yudin and his
band wearing all-white short suits.
Katy B’s back! Or at least making overtures toward being back! This weekend she performed with Jessie Ware on a song they did for last year’s Danger EP, and earlier this month she unveiled a stand-along rave-pop track called “What Love Is Made Of,” presumably the precursor to a new LP. It’s got a video now which, speaking as someone who’s never seen a Fast & Furious, is something I imagine would appeal to someone who’s excited to see the new installment Fast & Furious. YOUTHS AND HOT RODS.
