Music Videos

Another A$AP Rocky one that I love

Love the Gilla Band videos. Really go well with the claustrophobic, clattering vibe of the music.

The video for Shoulderblades is absolutely ace. Oona Doherty’s dancing perfectly captures the vibe of the song. CW: blood and injury.

Since Richard Dawson seems to create a different sense of time and place for every record, the videos help with this a lot. Ogre’s video plunges you right into the ancient, muddy kingdom of Bryneich, and Jogging perfectly captures the narrator’s journey through anxiety and eventual optimism incredibly well.

Anna Von Hausswolff’s “The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra” also plunges you perfectly into the accompanying album’s dark, operatic world:

Also quite a big fan of the knowingly ridiculous, OTT heavy music video, as practiced by Mastodon, Pig Destroyer and Red Fang, and recently revived by Cave In in their New Reality and Bloodspiller videos.

That’s enough for now I think!

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The waning cultural relevance of the music video and MTV can’t be the sole reason why I completely lost interest in the medium. I went from purchasing those Gondry, Cunningham & Jonze collections on DVD ~20 years ago to barely paying attention to releases by my favourite artists.

My best guess is that the advent of YouTube brought about an influx of other short form content that diminished it’s importance.

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Gondry has so many great ones, I was watching his dvd the other night, there’s some lovely stuff for bands I’d never heard of. Love his imagination, humour and his rough edged handmade style. This one for Protection stood out though as something special, such a perfect union between song and video, how much work must have gone into this. I tend to like quite simple videos, I guess the central idea of this is simple but the execution is dizzying

Tim Pope’s Cure videos were a pretty key part in establishing their identity. A wardrobe slowly filling with water perfectly matches the claustophobia of the song, love the quirky touches like the comb playing the piano melody and the little Cure dolls. Lullaby is brilliant too.

This isn’t flashy, it is charming though, I really like the use of stock bird footage and they sell the hell out of their birdwatching. Acting!

I really appreciated the variety and personality show in Metronomy’s videos, they always put a shift in. I like the style of this, nice references to previous videos

An evergreen tearjerker

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One of my favourites. Like you say, the perfect blend of sound and visuals, each elevating the other.

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I watch those DVDs a lot, but now I’ve got a massive telly I really need them to re release on Blu Ray.

Grew up loving music videos on MTV, it was a big part of discovering music at the time. Fast forward to today when everyone’s got smartphones and short attention spans, I can hardly bother to sit through an entire video even if it’s great. Maybe if I dedicated some time to using YouTube on the TV, but on my phone and computer I’ve always got a bunch of things I’m trying to do at once. Started to feel this to some degree in the early internet days and 00s too, once you could start doing a bunch of different things on a screen as opposed to just staring at it, things changed.

Some recent ones I recall really enjoying, from Yeasayer’s Fragrant World. They’re not high-budget or high-concept but they stuck in my mind. Happen to be my two favorite tracks on the album too.

Also have really liked some of the early ones from Viet Cong/Preoccupations:

(CW: Nudity on “Continental Shelf”)

The new one from Hak Baker is quite something