Ritwik Deshpande picks some of the best music, and music-based, videos around on the wonderful interwebz.
‘Midnight City’ – M83
The lead single off the new M83 double album Midnight City gets a beautifully bleak video, rife with telekinetic kids breaking out of an asylum. It’s an oddly menacing scene, but given the context of the music, it takes on an almost hopeful quality. Wonderful stuff.
‘Senator’ – Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks
Jack Black plays a coke-sniffing, cattle-prod abusing senator in SM & the Jicks’ titular video off their new album. It fits well with the deliberate camp we’ve come to expect from the Jicks while the sometimes-annoying Black’s portrayal is legitimately hilarious.
‘Cruel’ – St. Vincent
The Terri Timely/St. Vincent pair has produced excellent videos in the past (‘Actor Out of Work’, ‘Marrow’), but ‘Cruel’ is without doubt their best effort yet. The darkly comic video sees a mother-starved family kidnap Annie Clark as a temporary replacement and once tired of her, lead her to a premature death. Despite its dark ulterior motives, the family is likeable as ever, and Clark with her deadpan brilliance exudes that subtle sense of acceptance affable in its wake.
‘My Machines’ – Battles
How I’d kill to see that drunken guy break into ‘the escalator twirl’ the next time I’m at a party. This Daniels-directed video focuses on the terror unleashed by a combination of relentless escalators and indifference. Virtuosic camerawork, a simple, disarming concept – this is video-of-the-year material.
‘Polish Girl’ – Neon Indian
Science fiction is tricky ground. From stories to cinema, you’re one misstep away from a heap of mozzarella. And while it’s twice as hard when an element of romance is introduced, the video for Neon Indian’s ‘Polish Girl’ is textbook stuff on how you can combine the two without losing your cool.
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