Houses - "The Beauty Surrounds" (Official Music Video)

Chicago band Houses describes their interests on Facebook in four words: “Sustainable living, being alone.” Despite their isolationist tendencies, the band has released a slew of EP’s and a pair of full-lengths since 2010. Today, they released a new video for their single “The Beauty Surrounds,” from their forthcoming third album, A Quiet Darkness, due out in April. A tale of heartbreak and loneliness set in the desert, “The Beauty Surrounds” video is as aesthetically beautiful as the story is depressing.

Companion – “Only”

The video, from director Bridget Palardy, shows what happens when a mob of dancers takes over a beach at sunset.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra – “So Good At Being In Trouble”

Today, the twitchy indie trio Unknown Mortal Orchestra release sophomore album II, and they’ve also chosen this morning to drop their video for the surprisingly graceful and funky single “So Good At Being In Trouble.” The director, frequent Animal Collective collaborator Danny Perez, mostly leaves behind his usual brain-melt visuals to tell a relatively straightforward story. Christopher Mitz-Plasse, McLovin from Superbad, plays an angry young man who takes on a hippie cult.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "Jubilee Street" (Official Music Video) (NSFW)

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ new album Push The Sky Away is a couple of weeks away from release, and today we get the video for their languid, sinister “Jubilee Street.” Cave’s old buddy and collaborator John Hillcoat (director of the Cave-written films The Proposition and Lawless) helmed the video, which stars the great British actor Ray Winstone as a guy who ventures to seedy downtown establishments to get boobs shoved into his mouth. I probably don’t have to tell you this, but you shouldn’t watch it at work. After Gaspar Noé’s ominous “We No Who U R” video, this is the second Push The Sky Away video with a well-known and properly feared director.

Paperman - Full Animated Short Film

The Disney animated short Paperman is up for an Oscar this year. The technique used to produce it is a combination of hand-drawn art and computer animation, giving it the feel of a classic Disney film.

Paperman‘s seemingly seamless way of blending the personality of hand-drawn animation with CGI in the physical space of the story is the result of new in-house software called Meander, a vector-based drawing program that allows for manipulation of the line after the fact — something that Kahrs described as “just like painting on the surface of the CG.”

In practice, it successfully blends the best of both forms of animation together in way they’ve never been seen before. Depicting George and Meg as flat, drawn characters keeps them safely out of the uncanny valley that even the best CGI sometimes can’t avoid and somehow makes them seem more real; other sequences, like the multiple paper airplanes zooming through the air, would be far less convincing and far more time-consuming if rendered without the help of computer generated imagery.  

The plot? Boy meets girl, of course. Link

Woodkid - "I Love You"

Music video by Woodkid performing I Love You.

Video Directed by Yoann Lemoine
Cinematography by Arnaud Potier
1st AD Antoine Poulet
Featuring Matvey Lykov
Styling (Matvey) Kris Van Assche
Produced by Mourad Belkeddar & Roman Pichon Herrera
Executive Producer (iceland) : Jean --Michel Paoli 

Suede – “It Starts And Ends With You”

The reunited London glam-poppers Suede, whose initial early-’90s wave of hype was pretty much the Big Bang for Britpop, are about to return with a new album called Bloodsports. And now here’s the video for its first proper single “It Starts And Ends With You.” This is simply a performance video, but it’s shot to make the remarkably well-preserved band look like gloomy gods as they shimmy their way through a pretty good approximation of a single that their younger selves would’ve written.

Hundred Waters - "Boreal" (Official Music Video)

The serenity of nature meets bloody, terrifying monsters.

Café Tacvba - "Olita Del Altamar"

 

Music video by Café Tacvba performing Olita Del Altamar. Dir.: Gustavo de la Torre Casal / Rubén Albarrán

Rhye – “Open” (Version 2) (NSFW)

Sensuous Sade-intoned LA R&B outfit Rhye have already taken one pass at a visual treatment for their supple love song “Open,” and it very fittingly framed pretty shots of couples dry humping. This new version connects to their video for the ace track “The Fall,” in that the themes are the same: love is complicated, doubts are ever-present, it’s hard to stay open, the gnawing feeling of knowing something’s off. It’s not just a thematic thread, either: The troubled older couple from “The Fall” make a cameo near the end of this video about a younger couple setting up for the same, full-circle. Says Rhye: If you can’t stay open you’re bound to take the fall. Or maybe something not quite so literal. Or maybe that’s exactly what it is. Either way, that is good advice. And either way, this video and song are great. It’s mildly NSFW, if your work is squeamish about make-out scenes with lots of skin.

Rhye – “Open” (NSFW)(Version 1)

This languid video is practically softcore porn — it shows a revolving door of humping couples — but it works artistically, too, showing the awkward, fun parts of sex as well as the more traditionally televisual sexy parts. Gorgeous song, too.

Beach House - "Forever Still" (Short Film)

In making their short film Forever Still, the members of Beach House spent a night traveling to a bunch of different breathtaking locations in Texas to perform four different songs from their 2012 album Bloom. The 27-minute mini-movie looks absolutely gorgeous, with the band convincingly showing just how larger-than-life these songs are.

Dropkick Murphys – “The Boys Are Back”

 
Signed And Sealed In Blood it’s an exceedingly, gratifyingly simplistic album, and its most simplistic song is the opener, a gang-shout battering ram called “The Boys Are Back.” The song’s video has about as direct a concept as it needs: The band playing in a boxing ring, in a Boston gym, while fired-up punks surround them. There’s really nothing about this that I don’t like. Mark Higgins directs.

Antwon - "Still Guarded"

Last year, the San Jose rapper Antwon made a name for himself with his End Of Earth mixtape. Later this month, he’ll follow it up with a new one called In Dark Denim, and first single “Still Guarded” is a fashionably decaying, noisy thing with production from fellow punk-reared rapper Cities Aviv. Romoface directed the murky and low-budget video, which features a bunch of girls in cat masks and dog leashes and which may well creep you out.

Watch Beyoncé’s Super Bowl Halftime Show

Last night, the Baltimore Ravens won the motherfucking Super Bowl. Really, for those of us who come from Baltimore, everything else that happened is a footnote: The bizarre half-hour power outage that threatened to send the game into chaos, the Budweiser commercial with the horse that made everyone cry, the presence of porcupine cheerleaders at the Puppy Bowl. But we’re also lucky that last night had arguably the best halftime show since Prince tore it down a few years ago. Beyoncé, still apparently furious about all the talk of lip-syncing at the Inauguration, ripped through a strenuously choreographed, hit-jammed 14-minute show that took pains to highlight her absolutely-real vocal chops. Beyond a quick (and expected) Destiny’s Child reunion, the show had no celebrity guests, though it did have a female guitarist whose instrument shot sparks from both ends and a multiple-screen installation thing that made it look like Beyoncé was cloning herself in front of us. Watch the performance below before the NFL inevitably rains fiery hell down on all the YouTube posts.

Depeche Mode – “Heaven”

Depeche Mode have a new album called Delta Machine on the way, and a couple of days ago we heard the dramatic lead single “Heaven.” And now here’s the video, from director Timothy Saccenti, in which the band, playing in a dusty old church, co-stars alongside skulls and druid-robed aliens and ghost trees. It’s almost like the whole video just exists as bait for crackpot internet illuminati theorists.

El Parche - "Trago Patron" ("Homenaje a Nicolas Menacho")

Party nights, drink and women in the third person. Directs Eduardo (Yayo) Prada.

The song is part of the album "Homenaje a Nicolás Menacho" with the participation of: Andrés Barba, Animal de Ciudad, Doble-A, El Parche, Ex-Génova, Glen Vargas (Track), La Maga, Laura Camacho, Los Salmones and Romina Mazo. And can be downloaded free by following the download link.

Los Salmones - "El Carretero" (Homenaje a Nicolás Menacho)

Via: Voxpopuli.

Ra Ra Riot – “Beta Love”

David Dean Burkhart, a fan of Ra Ra Riot, recently made his own video for “Beta Love,” the dance-poppy title track from the band’s new album, by editing together footage from a local 1980s Bay Area UHF show called Dance Party. The band liked his work enough to make it the official video, and I’m not surprised. Those fuzzy images work as a monument to the timeless spectacle of giddy teenage awkwardness.

Kool A.D. - "Eroika"

The former Das Racist rapper (it hurts to type those words) Kool A.D. has a new solo album called 19 coming out, and first single “Eroika” is more or less a Lil B parody, and a pretty good one. (“Bitch, I’m Kevin Sorbo.”) The song’s video is an absurdly low-tech affair, with Kool A.D. and some friends getting very, very high and having some fun with green screens.