This past week was a big one for new music videos. It began on Sunday night with the YouTube Music Awards featuring “live music videos.” Arcade Fire and director Spike Jonze were up for the task with their “Afterlife” video, staring Greta Gerwig.
If you ever doubted Yoko Ono’s book of contacts wasn’t vast the new video for Plastic Ono Band’s “Bad Dancer” should convince you once and for all of its size. The surviving members of the Beastie Boys, Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier, Questlove, Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, Das Racist’s Heems, Reggie Watts, Roberta Flack and other familiar faces all appear. In addition to showing off her famous friends it combines elements from Ono’s 1965’s Film No. 1 (aka Match), 1966’s Ceiling Painting and 2008’s Touch Me.
The Entrance Band have signed with our friends Beyond Beyond is Beyond for their forthcoming Face the Sun LP, out November 19th. This week they offered a preview in the form of a video for “Spider.”
Creepy crawly… and psychedelic…
Ty Segall’s continues to support this year’s Sleeper album with a timely video for “The Man Man.” “Truly, surveillance is a bitch! We want to be seen and heard, but at what cost?” the press release explains…
Quilt’s eponymous debut record seemed to shoot out of nowhere in 2011 to grab the attention of psych-folk-rock fans everywhere (stream it here). Sophomore album Held In Splendor is out January 28, 2014 (pre-order LP, CD, MP3) and this week we got a first taste with “Arctic Shark.” Watch:
Yuck is another band that came out of the blue in 2011 and grabbed a lot of attention, in their case as best-new-90s-alt-rock-band-consisting-of-members-too-young-to-remember-the-era. In 2013 they lost their frontman, but that didn’t stop them from forging ahead with super fun sophomore Glow And Behold and now a clip for “Lose My Breath.” Any video that begins with a warning it may cause seizures has got to be golden.
“Passage” is a short film directed by Alex Braverman and Poppy de Villeneuve. It’s also essentially a music video for Kronos Quartet and (The National’s) Bryce Dessner’s “Tour Eiffel” (as sung by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus):
Wooden Shjips’ “Back To Land” is the lead single for their new album of the same name. The press release informs us, “Back To Land, the quartet’s follow-up to West, is the first Wooden Shjips record to be conceived outside of San Francisco. Ripley Johnson and Omar Ahsanuddin moved to Oregon, where the lush climates became a major influence on the songwriting. The band’s scope expanded to include more earthy, grounded tones, such as the acoustic guitar, without abandoning their modernist psych core. There is an increased brightness …” This adjustment in sound is reflected in the new video:
Woods’ acoustic ditty “It Ain’t Easy”” from last year’s Bend Beyond fits perfect to the warm breeze, Super 8 feel of its new video. Right? Use this to hold on to the Indian Summer in your mind and resist the reality that the holiday season and winter is upon us…
Likewise Metric are still supporting last year’s Synthetica with a new video for the title-track offering a variety of kaleidoscopic editing tricks:
And finally a shout out to a new video that isn’t exactly a “music video”…
You may recall this summer Moby posted a casting call for obese biker in speedos, a drunk king, a male (or flat-chested female) S&M gymnast and 12 goth choir members to appear in his “Perfect Life” video featuring Wayne Coyne. Later he explained, “wayne and i spent the day making a video for ‘the perfect life’. then at the end of the day we broke out an acoustic guitar and gathered all of the extras on a rooftop overlooking l.a and sang an unrehearsed, impromptu version of the song. please keep in mind we had no idea what we were doing...”
The video itself was released in September (watch here) but now we get a “behind the music… video” video…
The Future Heart 