The beginning of Body Language’s video for “Really Love” immediately brought to mind one of the books in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. In The Drawing Of The Three
the protagonist, Roland, wakes up on a beach with several freestanding
doorways that lead to alternate worlds — the same thing happens to the
heroine at the start of this clip. Though she’s reading Dante at the
start of the video, I’m gonna suggest she pick up The Gunslinger next. There are some pretty clear Alice In Wonderland
vibes here too, as she wanders through dim, concrete hallways chasing a
mysterious rabbit, and eventually stumbles upon smaller, weirder doors
that lead to bizarre, cult-like gatherings and creatures who range from
creepy to absurd. The final scene involves her, the giant rabbit, and a
flamethrower, but I’ll leave it to you to see how that trio comes
together. Watch the Dirby-directed video.
When the name of the mysterious producer Boots appeared, over and over, in the credits of Beyoncé’s staggering self-titled album,
he was an unknown, and he kept it that way for a while. But after a
period of mystery and obfuscation, it emerged that Boots was Jordy
Asher, the former leader of onetime Stereogum Band To Watch Blonds. In last year’s self-directed “Mercy” video, he even showed us the battered, bruised version of his face. “Mercy” was our first taste of the new Boots project: Motorcycle Jesus,
a thoroughly arty 30-minute short film that Boots directed himself.
Boots shot the movie in the Mojave Desert, and it includes a ton of new
music; an EP-length soundtrack will be the man’s first commercial
release under his own name. The movie also includes musical
contributions from Boots’ mentor El-P and from Carla Azar. I’m watching
the movie as I write this, and it appears to involve stabbings, robots,
and at least one song that sounds a whole hell of a lot like Queens Of
The Stone Age. Right now, you can watch the full film for yourself at
below.
Clare Maguire has been through some shit. After landing a once-in-a-lifetime record deal
at the tender age of 17, the singer was poked and prodded into a pop
star image that was the opposite of what the singer wanted for herself.
Following the flop of her major label debut, she grappled with alcohol
abuse, got clean, and re-emerged ready for her second lifetime — and
it’s been a spectacular one. Now that Maguire is calling the musical
shots, her sound leans toward blues, folk, and Americana and builds on
the foundation of intensely emotional, brazen female songwriters. While most of those songs
were slow-paced and down tempo, Maguire is on her diva shit in new song
“Don’t Mess Me Around.” This time, she’s berating a philanderer while
surrounded by a feisty, dancing sequin-clad choir of backup ladies. As
she belts out her aggression, I can’t help but remember her past. This
is a woman who has seen rock bottom and emerged stronger than ever. Do
not mess her around. Watch the James Willis-directed video.
After years as the man behind the curtain, Emile Haynie is stepping
out into the limelight with his first solo album. Except it’s not really
a solo album — Haynie has enlisted 13 of the music industry’s best and brightest to bring We Fall
to life. Today he’s shared the video for “Falling Apart” which features
the unlikely combination of Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson and
Andrew Wyatt of Miike Snow. Haynie has a knack for pairing up artists in
unexpected yet exceptional ways (see: “A Kiss Goodbye,”
which brought together Charlotte Gainsbourg, Dev Hynes, and Sampha). In
this case Wyatt handles the melody while Wilson adds his signature
vocal flourishes on a song that details one darling’s fall from grace.
The video is disconcerting; a girl free-falls through an idyllic outdoor
fountain and swirls of pastel colors as the scene around her slowly
loses clarity. It’s a beautiful nightmare.
Why does Europe get all the good award show moments? Aside from Kanye West debuting his long-awaited new song “All Day” at the BRIT Awards today, Madonna also took quite a tumble during her live performance.
Poor Madonna! Hopefully she’s OK. It seems like she recovered nicely,
though, professional that she is. Things aren’t all bad for her: Today
she once again covered Rolling Stone
and talked about ageism within the pop world. I gotta hand it to her,
she’s always fiery, which is why I love her even if the new songs don’t
really catch my interest.
New York’s A$AP Mob has had ties to the fashion scene since before
their ascension, and on his latest single A$AP Ferg reasserts the crew’s
connection in his video for Ferg Forever
track “Dope Walk.” The iPhone-shot clip features footage from Ferg’s
journey through New York Fashion Week parties. A few weeks ago high
fashion it-girl Cara Delevingne and Ferg staged a “walk off” via Twitter
and Instagram, and the video is a continuation of that, as Delevingne
facetimes with Ferg while he cruises through Manhattan fashion shows and
after parties. He also references her runway presence in the lyrics:
“My walk meaner than Cara Delevingne’s.” See if you can spot Haim, Kanye
West, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Big Sean, and A$AP Rocky in
there too. “Dope Walk” is even more catchy than “Shabba,” so I highly doubt this is the last we’ll be hearing of it.
Guitar virtuoso Kaki King is billing her next album, The Neck Is A Bridge To The Body,
as a multimedia project, and she’s teaming up with visual artists to
bring her new compositions to life. King has always had the ability to
create evocative imagery through few words, and in the video for
“Anthropomorph,” Shantell Martin takes on the task of translating it
into a visual medium. “Music really helps give my lines and words life,
and brings a natural spring to them,” Martin said in a press release.
“Listening and creating live to Kaki’s piece was almost like meditating:
becoming lost in the song; so full and present.” She creates a hectic,
non-stop kaleidoscope of images, adding to the sweeping scope of the
track.
Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson is one of the most legendary
figures in music, a guy who wrote and produced dozens of classic songs
and helped shape the album as music’s preeminent artistic statement.
He’s also a bit of an oddball, which makes him an ideal subject for a
Hollywood biopic. Just such a movie is coming to theaters this June. Love & Mercy
stars Paul Dano and John Cusack as Wilson; Dano plays the younger
Wilson, while Cusack depicts the musician’s older years. Elizabeth Banks
and Paul Giamatti have prominent roles, too.
Dutch Uncles’ excellent new O Shudder
is out this week, and the band has marked the occasion with an
extremely likable video for their lushly arranged, playfully executed
new wave single “Decided Knowledge.”
It stars a puppet version of frontman Duncan Wallis who grooves around
the Welsh beachfront town of Llandudno, mimicking Wallis’ real-life
dance moves. Plastic Zoo directed the clip.
Algiers are a Georgia gospel-spook trio who wield a double-edged
sword of religion and politics to slice through the pasty, vapid mess of
pop culture in America right now. In the video for “Blood” — only their
second song ever
— frontman Franklin James Fisher sits, barely restrained as he belts
out the song’s dirge-like condemnations. Interspersed with Fisher’s
coiled form are countless flashes of international violence and protest
against racism, musicians in critical, dramatic moments of their career,
and historical context that heavily concentrates on the tribulations
that African Americans have faced in the US. The refrain of the song
echoes over and over against a humming bassline, spartan drums, and
throaty backing harmonies: “All my blood’s in vain.” It sounds less like
a song and more like a living, breathing condemnation from God that
crawled out of a swamp somewhere in the South to force America to face
down its hideous past and pathetic political present.
Experimental pop trio Win Win have come back suddenly and swiftly after a near three-year hiatus, dropping “Couch Paranoia” and “Waster”
on a digital 7-inch earlier this month. Now the band is back yet again
with a video for “Couch Paranoia.” Though the track’s title brings to
mind a weedhead problem, the video is more of a mild surreal psychedelic
drug trip. The clip is a mix of modified stop motion, Lego-like
mosaics, and warped 3-D heads mouthing the lyrics. Here’s a word from
the band:
We’ve been exploring interactions between analog and
digital systems in both our music and art. By using a set of analog
inputs to a digital system, in this case video capture of a face or
swirling paint, and applying those to control a digital system ( a dense
3d mesh), you end up with the appearance of something that’s alive but
that moves in an alien, unfamiliar way. The video and the song both
attempt to simultaneously elicit reactions of revulsion and fascination.
Django Django has shared a video for “First Light,” the lead single from their upcoming new album, Born Under Saturn.
The clip, which was directed by Daniel Swan, is made up of a series of
computerized shots overlooking a futuristic city where all the buildings
are made completely of glass. The camera pans out slowly as the sunrise
refracts off of the large windows, bathing everything in light. Not
much happens, but it sure is pretty to look at.
Alice In Chains always seemed like the odd band out during the initial
Seattle grunge wave, and you could tell that, unlike their peers, they’d
never really spent time in the city’s punk underground. If you’ve ever
seen the band photo on the inside of their 1990 debut Facelift (an album that, after all, came out a year before Ten or Nevermind), you will probably not be surprised to learn that this band had a hair-metal past. You may, however, be surprised at just how much
of a hair-metal past they had. The band grew out of a mid-’80s unit
that seriously, no joke, was called Alice N’ Chains. And judging by
footage that recently appeared online, they were a straight-up
good-times nerf-metal band. Former band member Johnny Bacolas posted
footage of the band from a May 1986 show at Seattle’s Kane Hall. On the
one hand, only singer Layne Staley would still be in the band when they
became what they became. On the other hand, look at Lanye Staley!
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Staley so young, and I’ve certainly never
seen him with this much Aquanet in his hair.
“Running In Circles,”
the glistening new single from POP ETC, is probably the best thing the
group has done since the long-ago era when they were still calling
themselves the Morning Benders. The song is pure sleek, yearning ’80s
synth-rock revivalism, and the video builds on that aesthetic. It
plunges the group into a neon pink-and-blue universe that seems to exist
inside a Lite-Brite, that most ’80s of useless toys. (I had one.) Sami Jano and Steve Meierding directed the video.
Last year, the promising and ambitious young Atlanta sing-rapper
Raury catapulted straight to Mixtape Of The Week status with his Indigo Child project. Today, he’s made a video for “Seven Suns,” the tape’s blazing
soul-rock closing track. Raury insists that the new video is a “PSA,”
and according to a press release, that means it’s “a satire on how the
growth of mobile technology & social media, has created a virtual
world in which the citizens’ detach from real-time human communications
& interactions.” In practice, that means it’s a video of Raury and
his leather-clad telegenic misfit crew snatching people’s smartphones
and smashing or burning them. This is a dick thing to do! Don’t take
people’s phones! Find better ways to rebel, dorks! (It’s not meant to be
taken literally, but come on.) Still, the video is just gorgeously
photographed, and it makes for effective filmmaking.
Rochester band Joywave recently teased their debut album How Do You Feel Now?
Today they’re back with details on the album, tour dates, and the Keith
Schofield-directed video for the infectious, hard-hitting single
“Somebody New.” The video has the feel of the life simulation video game
The Sims mixed with later iterations of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
as the band absolutely shreds Los Angeles with a mob of misfits.
Joywave had this to say about the clip: “We wanted to look like we were
great at some physical activity, so CGI was the only option. For the
first time, we had the means to create an alternate universe in which we
were actually good at something.”
Familial duo Drenge are one of the UK’s newest breakout bands, and
their video for “We Can Do What We Want” is the kind of thing that can
grab people’s attention the world over. The Loveless brothers’
combustible rock rave-up serves as the soundtrack for director Ed
Lovelace’s chaotic crime spree, each component building tension to the
point of wild release. It’s a great video that marks Drenge’s Undertow as an album to keep an eye out for, but first direct your eyes.
Erol Sarp and Lukas Vogel met in college in Duesseldorf, Germany, and
quickly began to make music together as Grandbrothers. Sarp is a
trained classical jazz pianist and Vogel works with synthesizers and
electromechanical hammers. On “Naive Rider,” one of the first tastes of
their debut album, Dilation, Sarp’s playing evokes Bruce Hornsby for
me, but it’s tempered with Vogel’s percussive elements and light synth
flourishes. Watch the song unfold in a laser light show constructed by
Warped Type.
Best Coast just took the major-label plunge, signing to the Capitol subsidiary Harvest and announcing the release of California Nights,
their third proper album. Today, the duo dropped the video for the
album’s title track, which is also the first thing we’ve heard from it.
And holy shit, what a pretty song. The band seems to know exactly what
to do with major-label money, beefing up their rhythm section and piling
on layer upon layer of dreamy guitar, like this was Siamese Dream
or something. Amid all that float, Bethany Cosentino’s voice rings out
with a clear, conversational sort of beauty. It’s one of many Best Coast
songs about how much Cosentino loves living in California, and the
video, from director Adam Harding,
builds on that, showing floaty double-exposed images of sunsets and
palm trees and cacti, along with shots of Cosentino, Bobb Bruno, and
honorary band member Snacks the cat.
Former Supergrass frontman Gaz Coombes put out his sophomore solo effort, MATADOR,
last month, and he’s followed that up with a video for album track
“Detroit.” The video follows a runner as he makes his way through
picturesque mountains and rural roads, while Coombes pops up every once
in a while to show his face. The clip was directed by Peter Franklyn
Banks.
Along with Jerome LOL, the L.A. dance producer Samo Sound Boy is one
half of DJ Dodger Stadium, the duo who put together last year’s great Friend Of Mine album. Samo also co-founded the Body High label, and he’s just announced Begging Please, his debut solo album. Citing Marvin Gaye’s classic and devastating divorce album Here, My Dear as an inspiration, Samo has put together Begging Please
as a cohesive statement, one that tells the story of his own breakup
through the medium of dance music. First single “Baby Don’t Stop” is a
warm, gooey portrayal of the initial rush of attraction. Its video, from
director and past DJ Dodger Stadium collaborator Daniel Pappas,
is the first in a planned trilogy, one that will trace the album’s
narrative arc. The whole video is one long slo-mo shot of a woman who
looks very, very happy to be sitting down to eat in the Southern
California burger joint Tommy’s World Famous, making eyes at you, the
viewer, the whole time.
“I guess it took ten years for me to be an overnight success,” Big
Sean raps on “Skyscrapers,” the latest song from his new album, Dark Sky Paradise,
which is out today. In some ways this album does feel like Sean’s
ascent to a higher tier of rap, but really he’s been doing pretty okay
for himself since he guested on a bunch of Cruel Summer singles. Ever since Dark Sky’s lead song, “IDFWU,”
Sean hasn’t been standing on anyone’s shoulders, and “Skyscrapers”
emphasizes that again, while also remembering the way things used to be.
“What do you know about livin’ check to check/ To livin’ check to
check?” Sean raps (I’m a writer so I know quite a bit actually Big
Sean!) before launching into the song’s hook: “started from the basement
made it to the skyscrapers.” If it wasn’t a just-add-architecture
straight rip-off of “started from the bottom now we here,” I’d probably
love it. Still, it’s not a bad song, so watch him rap about his
long-overdue success in a red-lit elevator for the Dylan Knight and
Andrew Hines-directed video.
When we premiered “Land Gone,” the debut single off of Novella’s forthcoming album Land,
I commented on the London-based band’s retro inclinations, suggesting
that the album is fated to be referenced alongside shoegaze and
psychedelic greats. The song’s video is old-fashioned in a different
way: It could have been plucked from the American Bandstand archives circa ’67.
The Brooklyn rapper Ka is a model of DIY music-making. Generally, he
produces everything himself, releases and distributes it on his own, and
shoots his own videos — all while holding down a day job as a
firefighter. That intense, inward focus has done great things for
developing his meditative, impressionistic voice, and the last album he
released, 2013’s The Night’s Gambit,
was an Album Of The Week. The next time we hear from him, though, he’ll
have help. Ka has teamed up with the producer Preservation to form a
mysterious duo called Dr. Ken Lo, and their album Days With Dr. Ken Lo
is coming sometime soon. Their new self-directed video for the single
“Day 0″ is in keeping with the persona and aesthetic that Ka has
cultivated on his own. It’s dark and mysterious, with Ka rapping in
front of a projection of the original Manchurian Candidate. The song is tingly and tough, and it’s enough to get me real excited for this album.
When I interviewed Colleen Green about her new album I Want To Grow Up,
we talked about how most of the songs are dark first-person narratives
wrapped in the kind of bubblegum coating that makes them an effortless
first listen. Oh, and we discussed her favorite television shows. I Want To Grow Up
is as digestible as it is honest, and “TV” is an exemplary summation of
the record’s recurring themes. The song is an exploration of all of the
social anxiety and loneliness that leads us to sit in front of inane
television shows for hours on end. “I don’t have to worry about a
conversation/ And I don’t have to worry about being fun,” Green sings.
In the video for “TV,” Green is anything but alone — she’s joined by her
friends Mukta, Drew, and Kelly, as well as members of Girlpool,
Slutever, R.L. Kelly, White Fang, Arjuna Genome, and Spirit Kid, all of
whom join forces to act out a series of re-imagined reality TV shows.
The video lives up to this song’s greatness. Watch it over at Entertainment Weekly.
U2 are pushing “Every Breaking Wave” as single from Songs Of Innocence. The song got a radio-friendly treatment recently, and Belfast-born director Aoife McArdle made a 13-minute short film based on the song. Now McArdle’s film has been pared down to a proper music video. Here’s a quick synopsis from YouTube:
Set against the social and political turmoil of early
1980s Northern Ireland where McArdle grew up, the film “Every Breaking
Wave” is built around themes of emotional abandon and the uncertainty of
romantic relationships. The story follows two teenagers, one Catholic
and the other Protestant, who fall in love amidst ongoing violence.
Louisville post-punk trio Young Widows make videos as dark and dramatic as their grinding, hopeless songs. Their new clip for the brooding Easy Pain track “King Sol” is no exception. Director Christopher Wiezorek makes a
businessman’s morning routine especially daunting by interspersing
footage of solar flares. Then the guy ties up his oxfords and traipses
through the woods to revel in the heat of an apocalyptic sun. Pretty
mild stuff.
Alt-J have shared a video for “Pusher,” a muted track from their sophomore album, This Is All Yours.
The clip, which was directed by Thomas Rhazi, is centered on a manic
preacher as he proselytizes on a soapbox in the middle of an empty
field. Gradually, he’s encircled by a crowd made up of mostly bald men,
who listen but seem disinterested in what he has to say. The camera
sweeps around the field as the preacher goes on and on until it takes a
shockingly dark turn.
Depending on how you view these things, the Darkness arrived either
two decades too late or a decade-or-so too early. The band’s great first
album, Permission To Land, came out in 2003: If it had come
out in 1983, it would have been right at home alongside releases by
bands like Judas Priest, the Scorpions, and AC/DC. If the Darkness were
an emerging artist this year, they’d be part of a trad-metal revival
that includes everything from Ranger to Enforcer to Crypt Sermon. The
Darkness’ stock would be especially high right now due to the fact that
the band’s frontman, Justin Hawkins, had co-written one of the best
songs on Weezer’s 2014 comeback, Everything Will Be Alright In The End
(said song being “I’ve Had It Up To Here”). So it’s an apt moment for
the Darkness to return with a new album, their fourth, following 2012’s
underrated Hot Cakes. The new LP will be called Last Of Our Kind
and it’s preceded today by the lead single, “Barbarian.” I want to love
this because I honestly love all three Darkness albums, but to my ear,
“Barbarian” is a pretty weak song by Darkness standards, and the idea
that the Darkness are the “last of their kind” is a fallacy: Right now,
there are more bands playing in this style than there have been since
the mid-’80s. That said, I would be pretty damn surprised if the new
record didn’t contain a few bangers, and maybe “Barbarian” is better
than I’m giving it credit for. Listen and watch the comic book-style
lyric video below.
Brooklyn-based Grooms released their latest LP, Comb The Feelings Through Your Hair, earlier this week, and we’ve already seen a tremendous video for the song “Cross-Off,” starring drummer Steve Levine (who as it turns out, has a role on Better Call Saul). The album’s lead single, “Doctor M,”
is a slow-burning and meditative track that boasts the declaratory
line, “I’m never underdressed.” So, it’s funny that the accompanying
Levine-orchestrated video features two ghostly figures costumed in
shimmering satin sheets. Ghosts keep it casual, I guess.
John Legend and Common gave a rousing performance of their Selma
soundtrack contribution “Glory” at last night’s Oscars ceremony. They
were backed by a gospel choir, who occupied a stage that was set up as a
recreation of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of Bloody Sunday
during the Selma to Montgomery marches. Later in the night, “Glory” took
home the Academy Award for Best Original Song, beating out Tegan And
Sara and the Lonely Island, Glen Campbell, Adam Levine and Keira
Knightley, and Rita Ora. “The spirit of this bridge connects the kid
from the South Side of Chicago, dreaming of a better life, to those in
France standing up for their freedom of expression, to those in Hong
Kong, protesting for democracy,” Common said during their acceptance
speech. “This bridge was built on hope, welded with compassion and
elevated with love for all human beings.”
Tegan And Sara and the Lonely Island took to the Academy Awards stage
tonight for a deliriously fun performance of “Everything Is
AWESOME!!!,” the Oscar-nominated song from The Lego Movie.
Human counterparts of Lego figures (construction workers, astronauts,
cowboys) and an “awesome possum” populated the stage. Joining the
vocalists were Questlove, Mark Mothersbaugh (who co-produced the song),
and Will Arnett as Batman. Some lucky audience members including Oprah
Winfrey and Steve Carell were handed Lego Oscars.
Since Nile Rodgers guested on Daft Punk’s massive hit “Get Lucky,” it makes sense that they’d return the favor. After announcing It’s About Time, the first new Chic album in 23 years via Twitter, he’s begun teasing a video that Daft Punk made to accompany the record
Given the #SoulTrain mention, it’s likely Daft Punk’s contribution is
related to the video for first single, “I’ll Be There,” which you can
preview below.
That video (which is still a few weeks away) was directed by fashion
photographers Inez & Vinoodh (they did Lady Gaga’s “Applause”) and
stars Karlie Kloss, according to a blog post from Rodgers earlier this
week. That’s her in the image up top. It wouldn’t be the first time
Kloss worked with the robots.
Here’s what Rodgers writes about the Chic song, video, and album…
The music snippet that’s playing was supposed to never be
heard. That’s the reason why it’s crossed out with a red x on the track
sheet (image on the right).
When I listened to that track, I liked the fact that it was never
heard by the public before. As you can see on the track sheet we
replayed that song, and it became a song for Sister Sledge called “Love
Somebody Today.”
The outtake became a new song called, “I’ll Be There,” so named
because when I discovered my band’s co-founder Bernard Edwards’ body a
few hours after he’d passed away, I said, “Now, I can be there for you
in death, the way you were there for me in life.”
Back in the day ‘Nard always looked out for me. I was the reckless
one. We had lots of fun and good times. So on the song’s surface it’s
really happy. It’s about the origin of CHIC, and how dance music changed
our lives forever.
We’ve just shot the video for “I’ll Be There” with Inez &
Vinoodh, on the first day of Fashion Week NYC. Perfect timing for a
group called CHIC.
It’s also perfect that we’ve got one of the hottest and coolest
supermodels in the world to star in the video. Karlie Kloss. The first
thing she said when we met was, “Diana Ross’ album Diana is my favorite
record in the world.” I knew we’d found our R&B loving disco girl.
As with all CHIC albums, this one’s based on a concept. Four years
ago I was stricken with very aggressive cancer and I wasn’t sure how
much time I had left. I decided the album’s concept would be about time
and I’d feature as many people from the lifespan of CHIC that I could on
it.
The first single drops on March 20, 2015. It’s the vernal equinox –
when day and night are of equal length. But in parts of the Northern
Hemisphere, there will also be a total solar eclipse… so I’ll be
releasing the record at the exact start of that celestial event, in the
country and city where they set Greenwich Mean Time – London, England.
We’ll then do a series of concerts in England, and premier the video too.
The album’s title is: It’s About Time… because It’s About Time.
“I’ll Be There” (with the Martinez Bros.) is out 3/20 via Warner Bros.
We previously described TCTS and Aniff Akinola’s house-rap hybrid “Coupe De Ville,” from TCTS’ upcoming Body
EP, as “breezy,” “effervescent,” and “generally irresistible.” That’s
correct: Even I love it, and I’m someone who has spent my whole life
fielding people’s terrible “Coupe De Ville” jokes. (Also Cruella de Vil,
who spells her name totally different from me.) Anyway, the song is a
total jam, and the video — with Akinola’s disembodied head against a
computerized background — makes it even more fun.
May we all spend our final moments on this earth making out with some nerd. Are they making a Cloverfield sequel or what? I could really go for a Cloverfield sequel. But if this is as close as we get, then fair enough.
Up until, the members of Janelle Monáe’s Wondaland Arts Society have
been mostly known as the cool-looking, well-dressed gentlemen who dance
behind Monáe in videos. That’s not a bad lane, all things considered.
But this spring, Wondaland will release an as-yet-untitled compilation
that will allow all these guys to shine on their own. First up: Dapper,
red-bearded gentleman Jidenna, who’s coming with the clipped, slick
electro-soul single “Classic Man.” The video, from director and Solange
husband Alan Ferguson, gets into some dubious respectability-politics
stuff, with Jidenna saving be-hoodied youth from police harassment by
teaching them chess and kung fu. But the dance party footage, with
everyone done up in psychedelic Harlem Renaissance finery, is a thing to
behold.
Before Passion Pit began the run-up to their new album Kindred, sharing the early tracks “Lifted Up (1985)” and “Where The Sky Hangs,” frontman Michael Angelakos guested on “Pay No Mind,”
a single from the French dance producer Madeon. Angelakos isn’t in the
song’s brand-new video. Instead, the clip tells a sci-fi story about a
boy and a girl who want to break into a mysterious tower that shoots
glittering floating polygons into the sky whenever they touch it. You
know, simple stuff.
A few weeks ago Atlanta’s sleeper superstar Father enlisted OVO’s ILoveMakonnen and fellow Awful Records rapper Rich Po Slim to remix the eponymous track from his Young Hot Ebony mixtape. Put these three on a song together and nothing will ever go
wrong, but for the video, the men respectfully bowed out and let the
song’s subjects take over. Sure, these are video babes, but they’re not
presented in the typical doe-eyed, female-as-accessory form. Instead,
they rap along to the verses with the same kind of faux-swag that most
of us — male or female — have probably tried in the mirror to a Father
verse. Watching these women worm around to the song, primping, getting
drunk, and at times almost mocking the lines, further illustrates the
fluidity inherent in the art this community produces. With women as the
perceived speakers rapping lines men created, the meaning shifts in ways
both subtle and strong. For instance, the girl who mimics several long
puffs on a joint along with “Just don’t smoke all my weed, bitch” line
defuses any power that line might have had, flipping it in her favor.
The video was directed by GIL-TA and shot by Blake Cummings, and it’s
one of the most enjoyable rap videos I’ve seen this year. (Possibly
because there’s not a single man in it? A male hand enters the frame
once but isn’t invited back.)
Chaz Bundick has cycled through three or four different musical guises
since he came to our attention a few years ago, and his latest persona
seems to be “happily fuzzed out circa-1994 alt-popper.” The new Toro Y
Moi album What For? lands this spring, and first single “Empty Nesters” goes hard on Lemonheads/Weezer vibes. The same can be said of its brand-new video, which would’ve gotten some serious 120 Minutes
play once upon a time. In the clip, we see Bundick and his band wasting
time on a sunny afternoon, trying their hands at painting, and hanging
out with a fun-loving grim reaper. Bundick wrote, directed, and shot the
admirably scratchy video himself.
Over the past few years, a few big indie types have guested on the Fox cartoon sitcom Bob’s Burgers or covered the show’s songs. But now, for the first time, Bob’s Burgers has put in a guest appearance in a big indie band’s video. Or, rather, the video functions as a sort of Bob’s Burgers min-episode. “A New Wave” is maybe the catchiest song on the jaw-dropping Sleater-Kinney comeback record No Cities To Love, and it’s the song they played on Letterman before they played any reunion shows. It’s now the first of the album’s
songs to get a proper music video. In the clip, we see the animated
version of Sleater-Kinney magically appearing in Tina Belcher’s bedroom,
and a psychedelic dance party ensues.
Last year, the Norwegian singer-songwriter Sondre Lerche released a somber divorce album called Please.
His new video for “Lucky Guy,” a sort of bittersweet meditation on how
things went right before they went wrong, follows his clip for “Bad Law,”
from last year. This one captures Lerche and two backing musicians, in
stately black-and-white, playing the song, keeping their eyes downcast
almost the entire time. There’s so little to focus on visually that you
can’t help but pay attention to what Lerche is saying, and what he’s
saying is heartbreaking. Marius Hauge directed the stark, sad video.
Peter Doherty’s single “Flags Of The Old Regime”
is an undeniable bummer of a song, but what makes it certifiably
depressing is the fact that it’s a tribute to the late Amy Winehouse.
The song will be released next month by Walk Tall Recordings and all of
the proceeds will go to the Amy Winehouse Foundation, an organization
run by her father that seeks to empower at-risk youth through music
therapy and education. The funereal black and white video was shot by
Katia De Vidas in Thailand.
Girl Band have signed to Rough Trade and shared a video for
“Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?” It’s an eight-minute cover
of UK producer Blawan, and it serves as the centerpiece for Girl Band’s new EP, The Early Years.
The video is an exercise in mounting tension: It follows a mortician
prepping a body for a showing in excruciating, gory detail. About
halfway through, everything breaks as the song begins the build. The
mortician dances over the body as though he’s possessed, which makes the
subject’s heart start beating and toes start tapping. Before you know
it, they’re both dancing around in a violent freakout. It’s a fantastic
video, directed with a chilling clarity by Bob Gallagher.
Blur’s last album, Think Tank, was released in 2003, but they’ve spent much of the last few years teasing a follow-up, with Damon Albarn saying as far back as 2012
that “there will definitely be another Blur album.” Today, though, that
album has been announced, via a video chat on the band’s Facebook: The eighth Blur album will be released on April 28, and it’s gonna be called Magic Whip.
Initial recording started in Hong Kong in 2013, although the tracks
were temporarily shelved till November of last year. The album was
produced by Stephen Street (who also produced Modern Life Is Rubbish, Parklife, The Great Escape, and Blur),
and that’s the cover art above. There will be plenty more details to
come, but for now, that is more than enough. Oh, and here’s a video for
first single, “Go Out.”
Here’s the tracklist:
01 “Lonesome Street”
02 “New World Towers”
03 “Go Out”
04 “Ice Cream Man”
05 “Thought I Was A Spaceman”
06 “I Broadcast”
07 “My Terracotta Heart”
08 “There Are Too Many Of Us”
09 “Ghost Ship”
10 “Pyongyang”
11 “One Ong”
12 “Mirrorball”
Blur have announced one show in support of the album — on June 20 at London’s Hyde Park — but presumably many more will follow.
Earlier this month, folk multi-instrumentalist William Ryan Fritch put out his latest album, Revisionist,
a grand and sweeping statement marked by staggering beauty and a
careful patience. Those same qualities are present in the new video for
“Still,” a track that features vocals from Esmé Patterson. It was
directed by Gregory Euclide with help from Gábor Kerekes, and was made
by filming layer upon layer of paint. The result is an abstract,
artistic video that’s an immersive experience, dripping with an icy
coolness that acutely matches the song it’s accompanying.
At the end of last year, L.A.-via-Detroit singer/producer JMSN — pronounced Jameson — released a self-titled “Blue Album,”
his second collection of lush, smooth-as-hell R&B jams. The new
video for album cut “Foolin’” finds JMSN performing on the fictional Late Night Live! with Lance Charnow.
All soft-focus closeups and grainy fades straight out of the ’80s, it
comes across as simultaneously ironic and oddly sincere, a perfect match
for JMSN’s unabashedly soulful baby-making music.
Fools Gold’s godhead A-Trak and Virginia rap producer Lex Luger make
their return as the production supergroup Low Pros on “Who Wanna Play.”
The track features rapper Que (“OG Bobby Johnson”
still goes), and additional production from Metro Boomin, Sonny Digital
and Brillz, continuing their tradition of enlisting rising Atlanta
talents. Basically it’s an ominous trap banger that drops into warped
EDM, topped off with Que’s antagonizing, staccato rapping. It’s the
first new music from Low Pros since last year’s Low Pros EP1,
and the addled sci-fi animation comes courtesy of Kanye West
collaborators Nate Brown and Gustavo “Kidmograph” Torres.
Laura Marling has shared a video for “False Hope,” the spirited second single from her upcoming new record, Short Movie,
which is her fifth album in seven years. It’s a straight-forward
visual, featuring Marling and her band performing in the studio without
much fanfare. But when you’re as magnetic of a performer as Marling is,
sometimes that’s all you need. And it’s fun to see Marling rocking out
on an electric guitar after so many years of staying primarily acoustic.
Los Angeles is a city like a poisoned apple. Glistening skin and
supple, attractive colors cloak the rotting fruit that lurks beneath the
surface. I lived there for five years, and while the lyrics for “To Die In L.A.”
never specifically reference the city outside the title, the video
builds an insidious, absurdist portrait that’s eerily accurate. Directed
by SSION’s Cody Critcheloe, the visuals star Actually Huizenga as a sweetly vapid wannabe starlet navigating the glamor, chaos, and death of the city. Huizenga even copes with her own Portrait Of Dorian Gray-styled avatar that reflects the bloody reality of her transformation. The story plays out like a macabre take on The Big Lebowski, and Jana Hunter gets a sinister role, too.
Oliver Ackermann, frontman of the New York guitar-vroom trio a Place
to Bury Strangers, was also one of the people behind the Brooklyn DIY
venue Death By Audio, which closed its doors last year. Ackermann’s band played the venue’s final show, and they taped their video for “We’ve Come So Far,” a highlight from their new album Transfixation at the show. Director Matthew Conboy
does a nice job bringing you-are-there immediacy to the live video,
highlighting the strobe lights and fog machines and crowd-surfing as
much as the band.
Jack White’s solo album Lazaretto
is nearly a year old now, and it hasn’t run out of steam yet. White
just made a new video for “That Black Bat Licorice,” the unhinged rocker
he played on The Tonight Show
earlier this month. Or, rather, he made three different videos for the
song. And thanks to a new interactive-video setup, you can flip between
the three videos as the song plays. If you just hit play, you’ll see a
surreal animated video from director James Blagden.
It has White attempting to romance an Egyptian queen, White cutting out
his own tongue, and dancing bats. For most people, that would be
enough. But if you hold down the “3″ key, you’ll also see a moody
live-action video that White directed himself. And if you hold down the
“B” key, you’ll see another live-action video, this one from director Brad Holland, that’s just slow-mo footage of people headbanging. Check out the full experience below.
When A$AP Ferg dropped his Ferg Forever mixtape back in December, Tom named it Mixtape Of The Week and expounded upon the many ways that the rapper is “kind of a dork.” Ferg’s video for the track “Doe-Active”
is the crowning jewel of that sentiment. It finds Ferg indulging in
babes, beaches, and booze all while dancing with a damn lemur (or is it a
monkey?) on his shoulders. The party continues in the city. Watch the
Spike Jordan-directed video.
Pussy Riot have shared a video for a new song called “I Can’t
Breathe,” which is dedicated to Eric Garner, who was killed by a police
officer in July. “This song is for Eric and for all those from Russia to
America and around the globe who suffer from state terror — killed,
choked, perished because of war and state sponsored violence of all
kinds — for political prisoners and those on the streets fighting for
change,” the group wrote, introducing the song. The video was filmed in
Moscow, and sees Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina buried alive in
Russian police uniforms. The song itself was recorded in New York with a
number of American collaborators, including Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick
Zinner, Miike Snow’s Andrew Wyatt, and punk legend Richard Hell. The
track also features vocals from Russian punk bands Jack Wood and
Scofferlane. At the end of the song, Hell recites the last words Garner
said before he was murdered.
English indie rockers Palma Violets ended a year-long silence yesterday, dropping the title track off their upcoming sophomore album, Danger In The Club.
Less than 24 hours later, they offer a matching set of visuals. The
Roger Sargent-directed clip is a crisp single shot, smoothly maneuvering
through the Pineapple pub in Palma Violets’ native London as they
perform the song and patrons get drunk swigging ale.
Puerto Rican pop duo Buscabulla released their self-titled four-track
EP last fall. Today, they drop the visuals for the Dev Hynes-produced
track “Métele.” The song’s minimal yet decadent sounds comprise lush
drums, ’80s synths, and dreamy vocals, which here serve as the
soundtrack to three drag queens preparing for a show in Puerto Rico. The
video was directed by Dan Sickles and Dr. Antonio Santini, the minds
behind an upcoming documentary on the Puerto Rican transgender and drag
community titled Mala Mala.
Denai Moore writes spare, earnest songs about loss that belie her young age, and “Blame”
— which we premiered a few weeks back — is one of her best so far.
Moore is just a few months out from releasing her debut album Elsewhere,
and today she’s unveiled wintry, dramatic video that accompanies
“Blame.” Shot in January in Iceland and directed by Simon Cahn, the
visual mimics the tension of the music by playing with our sense of
time. “The idea for this music video was to build a climactic fictional
sequence around the artist,” Cahn said.
“I wanted to work on a time-loop that drops the viewer at the end of a
narrative, leaving just a trail of ambiguous elements, so that each
viewer has their own interpretation of what the story could be.”
Lou Reed was both an avant-rock forefather and a legendary crank, and I sincerely recommend that you spend some time with this Lester Bangs piece
about a contentious Reed interview. PBS recently animated an interview
that Joe Smith conducted with Reed in 1987, and it has a lot of
interesting stuff about what Reed was trying to do with the Velvet
Underground. He says that he wanted to inject adult ideas into rock and
roll, and people were not trying to hear it: “I write a song called
’Heroin’ and you would’ve thought that I’d murdered the Pope or
something.” He also has some harsh words for some of his contemporaries
who were also trying to test the bounds of the medium, though
not in ways that Reed thought were particularly interesting.
The Bay Area rapper 100s released two great mixtapes of nasty, hard-as-fuck pimp-rap, 2012′s Ice Cold Perm and last year’s IVRY.
Apparently, though, there was a new-wave singer hiding under that
luxurious hair, just waiting to get out. 100s has now changed both his
name and his sound. He’s going by Kossisko now, and he’s reinvented
himself as a brooding, gothic synthpop singer. His new single “This May
Be Me” has exactly zero rapping on it. Instead, it’s a darkly shimmering
synthpop tune with a guitar-solo eruption and a ton of forbidding
atmosphere. Kossisko cites the Sisters Of Mercy and Billy Idol as
inspirations, and his new “This May Be Me” video, from director Adam Tillman-Young, is nothing but him singing in tight close-up while bathed in red light.
S. Carey’s Supermoon EP is out today, and to commemorate the occasion
he’s released a video for the alternate version of “Neverending
Fountain.” Carey’s music is often compared to the pastoral beauty of
Middle America’s undeveloped areas, and director Davin Haukebo-Bol has
paired the song with gorgeous images of Alaska that capture that same
essence.
When I see the word Yung, I usually assume it has something to do
with rap slang, but that is definitely not the case for the Danish
quartet who chose it as their name. They only have one song out, but “Nobody Cares,” from their upcoming release Altar,
is memorable and savage enough that they might shift the whole
conception of the word on their own strength. Yung have now released a
very DIY, grainy video to accompany the song. The music starts off
calmly enough, like an early Strokes song maybe, before whipping itself
into a brick-through-window frenzy. The emotional shifts are reflected
instantaneously in the video’s switch from quiet landscapes to frazzled
screens, shots of the band performing and smoking teenagers. The
home-video style of the clip helps make the fury feel accessible, not
angry. Sometimes you gotta get mad just for the joy of raging, you know?
Director Kevin Bennett gives Matthew E. White’s “Rock & Roll Is Cold” an extremely literal treatment, filming White wandering a snowy landscape while the Fresh Blood
single unfurls. The upbeat, orchestrated soul-pop reminds me of a
softer, happier “Sympathy For The Devil,” but White’s message is blunt
and merciless.
Alt-pop outfit the Juliana Hatfield Three reunited last month following a hiatus of 20+ years, and have already released a bunch of new music off their long-awaited sophomore album, Whatever, My Love.
In tandem with the release of the album today, the latest addition
comes in the form of a video for the catchy single “If Only We Were
Dogs.” The visuals are a humorous literal interpretation of the song
title, with Hatfield on all fours begging for scraps, getting pets, and
being walked by her bandmates.
Austin’s Pompeii released their third record, LOOM, last
year, which marked the tenth anniversary since the band’s formation in
2004. The video for “Blueprint” perfectly mimics the sense of reckless
abandon that Pompeii conveys through their music — songs tend to
initiate as delicate and ambient before descending into tumultuous
post-punk. Norwegian film director Thor Brenne traveled to Austin to
shoot the video, which features pro BMXers Joseph Frans, Matt Nordstrom,
as well as co-directors Joe Rich and Sandy Carson. Brenne commented on
the nostalgic sentiment of his short film:
I wanted to create a video that captures the freedom of
being young. The summers you spent hanging out, getting into trouble,
and creating friendships over doing the things you love. BMX biking is
an amazing world that brings to life the spontaneity of what it is to be
young.
The Cribs get shipwrecked in their new video for “Burning For No One,” the second single from their forthcoming album, For All My Sisters.
The video, which was directed by Nick Scott and Andrew Knowles, follows
the UK brothers after they get abandoned on an island and have to fend
for themselves. They avoid any kind of Lord Of The Flies-esque
histrionics, though, mainly using the occasion as an opportunity to lay
out on the beach and hang out with the native pig population.
Since Hiko Momoji’s cute and chirpy “Late Nights”
is already an ode to Netflix-and-wine romance, the New York-via-London
producer released a video for the track on Valentine’s Day. In case you
were too busy on a date to catch the cuddly clip when it dropped this
weekend, it’s a peek into the hang out session that Father and Abra
imagine on their respective verses. Watching Abra rap wrapped in tinsel,
wine glass in hand is especially entertaining, and when the pair cuddle
they almost look like a real couple rather than just Awful Records
label mates. Father is already on the radar off the strength of Young Hot Ebony,
but hopefully this song will help put some shine on Abra, who might
have the stronger verses here. Between the Hello Kitty suckers, candy
hearts, blankets, wine, and tinsel, directors Rob Coin and Kamil Boguski
have given us a lot to like here. Close watchers will catch a brief
glimpse of Momoji himself at the end. His debut tape Howl is due this month, and if the rest of his material is as strong as this, it’ll be one to look out.
Montreal synthpop trio Le Couleur champion the kind of
bubbly-toasting, nightclub-slithering, titanic glamor that will never
fall completely out of style. It’s not a pastiche, either. Their records
are svelte but bursting with movement, with supple basslines directing
the traffic of unyielding percussion. And even that metaphor may be a
bit too pedestrian considering Le Couleur’s sugary French vocal
delivery. All of their chic is reflected in the sensual disco burner
“Club Italien,” featured on their new EP, Dolce Désir. In the
song’s languid single-shot video, we’re spun around a late-night
cocktail lounge to catalog the antics of its (mostly male) patrons,
while the band grooves elegantly in the corner. There’s a twist, too,
which makes for a bit of added fun at the end. La Barbe Rousse and
Joseph Heskia direct.
On his new album Brava, the French dance producer and Yeezus
contributor Brodinski teams up with a series of largely unheralded
American street-rappers to make some absolute bangers. We’ve already
posted his Young Scooter collab “François-Xavier” and the video for his SD team-up “Can’t Help Myself.” On the new single “Us,” he joins forces with the Atlanta rapper Bloody Jay, whose Young Thug collaboration Black Portland
was among last year’s best mixtapes. In the track’s amazing new video,
Brodinski gets high in a Shanghai hotel room (that’s Shanghai, right?)
and has visions of tiger-striped puppies and flying motorcycles and
kabuki warriors. It’s a hell of a thing to watch, and Jeremie Rozan directs masterfully.
Atlanta autotune soothsayer Future is currently promoting two back-to-back mixtapes, the aggressive, hedonistic Monster and the Zaytoven-produced Beast Mode. One of them is possibly a tribute to Marshawn Lynch and earned our Mixtape Of The Week distinction. One of them did not. Sadly for us, Future has released a new video for “Gangland,” a track that is not off Beast Mode. In the video, directed
by Nyce, he explodes around a tagged-up warehouse, bouncing off the
walls and stairs, rapping boastfully about everything from making syrup
to seducing your girl. He also wears a balaclava for like half of the
video, which seems to be something of a theme in music lately. I’m crediting Pussy Riot for that. Personally, I still haven’t forgiven Future for losing Ciara, so I don’t really even enjoy this, but if you have.
Experimental sample-based producer Romare has made a video for his
new track “Motherless Child,” which uses dual screens of archival
footage to set a somber, meditative mood. “There are two tributes
running through the song,” Romare explains. “One is to John Lennon and
the other is to the spiritual ’Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless
Child.’ The two are related as John Lennon’s mother was killed when he
was young, so I thought I would juxtapose moving images to explore this
relationship.” And indeed, there’s video of a young Lennon matched up
with imagery from the civil rights movement, putting the domestic right
alongside the working class.
Two years have passed since psych-thrashers Destruction Unit released Deep Trip,
but today they’ve debuted a stark, black-and-white video for the
massive throttle of album track track “Final Flight.” We get clips of
the band performing inside a restaurant interspersed with shots of
Joshua Tree’s wilderness, director Cali Thornhill DeWitt’s 59-year-old
uncle doing what appears to be yoga, and a snarling dog. Although
seemingly disconnected, all the images convey the same sense of barely
restrained force that Destruction Unit always channel.
Royal Blood – “Out Of The Black (Version 2)” (Dir. David Wilson & Christy Karacas)
Now that this hyperviolent fever dream exists, hopefully we can convince Hollywood that there’s no need for a Men In Black 4, at least unless it plays out something like this.
Working with director Andrew Thomas Huang, Björk has made a short film for “Black Lake,” the soul-ripping 10-minute centerpiece from her emotionally heavy new album Vulnicura. The video is part of Björk’s new Museum Of Modern Art retrospective,
where you’ll be able to see it in some sort of immersive 3D experience.
I hope a 2D version of it ends up online, though, since this thing
looks intense. In a minute-and-a-half trailer that just appeared online,
we see Björk lying in what looks like a shallow grave, her body
literally halfway torn apart, as some sort of ineffable life force leaks
out of it.
Taylor Swift has done a lot of things in music videos, but
“smoldering” isn’t one of them, at least until now. This morning, Taylor
unveiled the new video for her single “Style.” “Style” is one of the
best songs on the world-conquering album 1989, and it’s the strongest argument that Taylor has been listening to the Drive
soundtrack lately. After making bright, cartoonish romps for her “Shake
It Off” and “Blank Space” videos, she’s tried to go a different way
here: An evocative and romantic video that could’ve played on VH1 next
to “Wicked Game” back in the day. In the video, Taylor and a strikingly
handsome dude stare at each other, and at their own reflections, and at
each other when they appear in their respective own reflections. Taylor
is going to need to practice a bit more before she can effectively pull
off this “smoldering’ thing.
Spirit Club is the new side-project trio
led by Wavves frontman Nathan Williams, and they only just announced
the impending release of their self-titled debut. Their second video,
after “Still Life,” is for “Duster,” a relatively soft, poppy song without that much punk in it. The video, on the other hand, has a lot
of punk in it. It tells the story of a boogie boarder who dies, and it
stars the band and their friends as the guys who skateboard in his
funeral procession. The whole clip is sort of a fantasy of a burnout
funeral, with assorted dirtbags pouring beer and leaving bags of chips
at the grave site, then holding a Ouija Board session right after. Jack
Wagner directs.
Floridian post-punk outfit Ex-Cult mediate their new breed of
hardcore with the manic energy of what I can only imagine an early
Dischord show must have felt like. It’s timeless. The band released
their latest EP, Cigarette Machine, last week, and today we’re
premiering a fan-shot video for the lead track, “Clinical Study.”
Ex-Cult’s recordings hone an all-consuming and addictive vivacity that
makes you want to see them perform live, so, it’s a pleasure to watch a
video of footage shot by Michael Valdes of various recent Ex-Cult shows.
The band’s frontman, Chris Shaw, explains how the video came about:
Michael Valdes has followed Ex-Cult on numerous tours,
catching shows in Seattle, Miami and everywhere in between. This guy
comes and goes like the wind, often disappearing to sleep in his rental
car or bus terminal before we can offer him a spot on the floor at where
ever we end up crashing. He never mentioned to us that he’d be
traveling by bus on our short tour late last year, but there he was on
our second stop, camera in hand. These shots mostly take place in
Florida, a state we were playing for the first time with native
wet-brains The Golden Pelicans. We are thrilled to finally have a music
video that captures the intensity of our live shows, even more so to
have a friend of the band behind the camera.
The new Decemberists album What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World
starts with an intensely winky meta-song called “The Singer Addresses
His Audience.” The band just started touring behind the album, and they
played the first show of that tour two nights ago in Dublin. Colin Meloy
opened the show by playing a solo-acoustic take on that song, with the
rest of the band joining him halfway through. It was their first time
playing the song ever, and it’s an effective piece of stagecraft. Below,
you can watch a fan-made video of the performance.
Kanye West launched his adidas Originals Yeezy 750 Boost shoes
and YEEZY SEASON 1 “solutions-based” fashion line at an elaborate
presentation for New York Fashion Week today, and he used the occasion
to debut the opening track on his new album. It’s called “Wolves,” and
features Vic Mensa and Sia. Cashmere Cat and Sinjin Hawke produced.
Kanye’s entire fashion show is online now, and you can hear a
studio-quality version of “Wolves” in it. It starts around 8m25s.
Watch an ad for the shoes below. They’ll be available in NYC this
Saturday, 2/14, and worldwide on 2/28 at adidas Flagship Stores and
select Consortiums. Additional styles will be announced soon.
A year ago, the Atlanta rap bugout king Rome Fortune released his mellow, contemplative Beautiful Pimp 2
mixtape. It was good. And he’s just now gotten around to unveiling the
video for “OneDay,” a track from the mixtape. In the clip, Rome goes to
Philadelphia and spends time with his grandfather, who plays vibraphone
on the track. We see the two of them bonding and playing a show
together, and it’s just an extremely warm and touching thing to see.
Goldrush directed the video and filmed it gorgeously.
PUP released their self-titled debut album last spring, and never
looked back. They toured alongside the Menzingers, headlined a US tour,
played internationally in Europe and their native Canada last year. They
are currently touring Australia (as if they didn’t hit enough
continents), but even with the band’s Aussie adventures aside, they’ve
played more than 250 shows since releasing PUP. If you need evidence of their energy, watch the video they dropped today for “Back Against The Wall.”
Earlier this week, Florence + The Machine debuted a video titled “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful” that was too magnificently restrained not to be the precursor to something else. Indeed it was — Florence was on Zane Lowe’s BBC Radio 1 show
today and revealed that her new album is coming in June, and it will
share a name with the video (sans commas). She also premiered another
new video from the forthcoming record: the thundering “What Kind Of
Man.” It might sound like a song geared up to berate and the song exudes
a sense of wonderment at her own prolonged faithfulness. The visual
follows a couple through the ups and downs of a relationship, and
Florence fights off men throughout the clip. Like her previous video, it
was directed by Vincent Haycock with choreography from Ryan Heffington.
Teen pop stars seem to just keep getting cooler. Maybe it’s because I
grew up watching Britney Spears fall apart, but every time I heard of
another pre-teen embarking on a career as a musician, it used to scare
me. I didn’t want the industry to warp them into a waif-like version of
themselves, or take the bones of good songs and fatten them into radio
hits. But the rising crop of young artists seems to feel the same way as
I do, and simply refused to conform to the stereotypes of the past.
Take Lorde and her black lipstick, un-straightened hair, and ’80s
pantsuits. Or consider SOAK, 18-year-old Bridie Monds-Watson, who rocks a
short pixie cut, skateboards, and chirps along to poignant lyrics in
her very Irish accent. When I watch her wander through the video for
“Sea Creatures,” she seems so genuinely herself, and comfortable in her own skin.
It’s the kind of music video I wish I could’ve grown up watching, and
it makes me more excited for her future than ever. Over an old-school
soul bass line, the clip pulls in three different narratives and ties
them together in a tragic ending, flipping the song’s naiveté in such a
sophisticated way that suddenly, her youth seems impossible. But when
she sings “I don’t understand/ What her problem is/ I think she’s just a
fish,” her adolescent silliness is so wonderful and apparent. There’s a great Jack Finney short story called The Night People
where these four adults begin meeting up in the middle of the night and
pulling all sorts of pranks together, essentially, playing. Their
adventures create this intense bond between the four of them, and
culminate in a situation that of course, filters back into their
daylight lives. When she’s skateboarding through the deserted streets in
the video, that’s the kind of otherworld SOAK has created for herself.
Her debut album announcement accompanied the release of the video, and
it’s called Before We Forgot How To Dream. If this is the kind
of musician the next generation is going to grow up idolizing, maybe
when they grow up they won’t have to forget.
We already know that the genre-bending alt-rap collective Doomtree
packs a serious punch, but their new video for “Final Boss” is
straight-up violent, recalling the low-key gory “Tiff” video
from fellow Twin Cities band Poliça. The clean, creepy treatment by
director Maria Juranic features Sims, Dessa, P.O.S., and Mike Mictlan
sitting down to a Rocky Horror-style last supper, rattling off
tight verses before getting individually snuffed out by a looming Cecil
Otter. It’s a grim comment on the inevitability of death, but not
without a final twist to unsettle your already-upset stomach.
Hundred Waters’ album The Moon Rang Like A Bell is the
better part of a year old at this point, but that thing has legs. Case
in point: The band has made a new video for the album track “Innocent,”
and it’s enough to help you hear an already-beautiful song in a new way.
Jeremy Clapin directed the
animated video, a mysterious sci-fi tale about a sentient robot vacuum
cleaner who looks something like a floating octopus and who’s on a
mission to rid an abandoned space station of creepy glowing-eyed bugs.
There’s a lot of contemplating the vast isolation of space, but there’s
also a story, as the video weaves in little hints about what happened
here. Animated music videos usually aren’t worth your time, but this one
is.
In the time between the two albums, frontman Travis Johnson recruited a new drummer, Steve Levine, who is also an actor and comedian. This week, Levine had a starring role on the massively popular new TV show "Better Call Saul",
a spinoff of "Breaking Bad". He and his real-life twin brother Daniel
played con-artist skateboarders Lars and Cal who team up with main
character Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) on a con that goes drastically wrong. Watch the first episode of the show here.
But
that wasn't Levine's only starring role this week. He's also in his
band's new video for "Cross Off", which can be watched. Directed by the band and filmed in Johnson's apartment, it
features Levine getting a very funny makeover.
Several weeks ago, Shlohmo unveiled his slow-burning new single “Buried” to accompany the announcement of his forthcoming record, Dark Red.
Today, the producer released an unsettling video for the track by
director Lance Drake. It’s a gorgeously rendered, horrifying chronicle
of a young pregnant woman’s nervous breakdown on the desolate streets of
Los Angeles. Though it shares the song’s frenetic energy, it’s not an
easy viewing experience. According to a press release, the video
attempts to explore the “circle of life and death.”
It’s been a while since we’ve heard from the fiery Mississippi
rapper/producer David Banner. But if you’ve ever seen this guy live, or
had a conversation with him, you probably walked away thinking he was
one of rap’s fiercest and most vital presences. So it’s great to see him
rumble back into action in the video “”Evil Knievel,” a one-off single
he dropped late last year. The song is a furious rumination on America’s
history of institutionalized racism, and it connects dots from Tuskegee
to Congo without losing its from-the-gut intensity. In the video,
Banner is in street-corner-preacher mode, and it’s a good look for him.
One of the things I appreciate the most about Rae Sremmurd is their
tendency to make turn-up anthems like “Lit Like Bic” that are actually
pretty slow-paced songs. Producer Mike Will Made It seems to favor that
style — “We Can’t Stop”
for example — and speaking of Miley Cyrus, she’s just one of many
celebrity cameos in this new video for the Atlanta duo’s song. There’s
so many famous faces that the guys are actually having a contest to see if fans can identify all the celebrity cameos. Rae Sremmurd are just off the release of their debut album Sremmlife, but since their breakout hits “No Flex Zone” and “No Type” dominated radio in 2014, they already have plenty of famous friends. Consider this: “No Type” got so popular that even Pat Sajak knows it.
The fact that they’re on Mike Will’s label surely doesn’t hurt either.
Another great thing Rae Sremmurd have helped usher in is the era in
which everything good is “lit.” At one point, they’re on the dance floor
holding handles of alcohol with sparklers attached to them. Surely,
that is as lit as one can get. Watch them brush shoulders with many
members of the illuminati in the “Lit Like Bic” video.
For one of the slower, jazzier numbers on his debut album B4.DA.$$,
Joey Bada$$ enlisted BJ The Chicago Kid, an incredibly slept-on crooner
out of (duh) Chicago. BJ handles the hook and other melodious flair for
“Like Me,” and the dark subject matter of the video benefits from his
plush vocals. Last year saw an outpouring of media attention on the
unwarranted shootings of young black men by police, and the visuals
tackle that topic head-on. Embroiled in a love triangle, Joey ends up
held at gunpoint by his girl’s ex, then escapes when police shoot both
of them during the chaos. Later, police find him again and shoot when he
tries to flee the scene. But death is not the end, and a resurrection
sequence spurred on by halos of white light around the fallen unfolds.
Watch the moving visual by director Nathan R. Smith below.
