Hello, friends. Back again with another massive year-end list for your downloading pleasure. This time around though, we’re shifting the focus from audio to video. That’s right, it’s my Top 50 Music Videos of 2006 and while Shots Ring Out did an amazing job and got a lot of ground covered with their incredible list (GO HERE NOW), they missed a few gems here and there and well, I promised I’d be dropping a list of my own so here it goes. Let’s do this:
Director: Joseph Kahn
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Brilliant. Epic. Country-Western. Lasers. Enough said.
Director: Ben Rollason
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Minimalist camera trickery and a brilliant vision converge to create one of the year’s most impressive directorial accomplishments. I couldn’t even begin to explain (or even guess) at how these effects were achieved, so I’ll let director Ben Rollason take it from here:
The backdrops are stills, but it’s all shot with a moving camera. Scenes were filmed for several minutes, with actors posing still. Unbalanced poses are supported by ropes, boxes, sticks, inflatable air mattresses and so on.(which you can see in the shots). The point was to see genuine physical pain and uncontrolled muscular spasm as the ’stills’ collapse.
The post process was simply to speed the footage up by varying degrees (up to 20x) and then blend frames together to create a time continuum within each frame, (sometimes as many as 700 frames per frame). The blurring is real motion blur. Sometimes the actors held a pose, save for one limb which they continually moved back and forth. In the finished shot they appear static, but the limb is a blur.
As the footage speed increases and the frame blending reduces, the movement reveals itself.
Did I mention this video’s fucking brilliant?
Director: Ben Dickinson
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Schoolhouse Rock-style animation meets summertime in Brooklyn in the year’s most fun video, directed by Waverley’s Ben Dickinson for the Rapture’s “Whoo! Alright, Yeah… Uh Huh”.
Director: Rozan & Schmelz (Surface 2 Air)
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
The best party jam ever gets a video that documents what appears to be the morning after the best, most ridiculous party ever in hilarious fashion, courtesy of Partizan tag team Rozan & Schmelz.
Director: Ace Norton
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Ace Norton put that USC Film School degree to good use in ‘06, his best year yet, coming into his own and releasing some true gems along the way. At the forefront of said gems is his awesome clip for Teddybears’ “Cobrastyle”. “Cobrastyle” was perhaps the most fun track of last year (the fucking “ba wit da ba” chorus!) and the video is every bit the joyride that the song is, taking a Behind The Scenes-style look at the rise, fall and subsequent rise of the Teddybears, if the Teddybears had been a high-flying American arena-rock band in the 80’s rather than just you know, a couple of dudes with a knack for pop music from Sweden.
Director: Terry Hall
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
“First love, lost love…”, we’ve all been there. This video for the Maccabees’ most recent single and greatest work to date documents forlorn victims of love lost and the various strange ways they go about coping. With a similar intensity and energy to that found in Martin De Thurah’s video for “Human” (the best video of last year), Terry Hall’s clip does a brilliant job of succinctly and profoundly capturing the inconsolable feeling of lost love and the strange (but completely realistic) things people do to overcome it.
Director: Woof Wan-Bau
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
2006 got off to a bit of a slow start as far as great music videos are concerned, but that all changed when Woof Wan-Bau dropped his latest masterpiece, for The Duke Spirit’s “Cuts Across The Land”, in March of this year. Wan-Bau, who’s best known for the haunting black and white clip he made for Four Tet’s “My Angel Rocks Back And Forth”, creates another incredible black and white epic here. The video revolves around lead singer Liela Moss’s brilliantly blond locks, which Wan-Bau highlights with diffuse lighting and projects as a spotlight from various standard light sources (a lighthouse, car headlights, a flashlight, etc.). It’s a bit hard to explain, but it’s brilliantly executed and you’ll understand when you watch the video.
Director: Alex & Liane
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
1000% YES!
Director: Jon Watts
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
I seriously waited the entire summer for TV On The Radio to release their Jon Watts-directed video for “Wolf Like Me”, primarily because the song was my favorite of the summer and is one of the most bad-ass tracks ever. Watts does it justice and more, creating a video that couldn’t fit the song more perfectly. The cinematography and after-effects of the clip are top notch and the 80’s b-movie horror film vibe is perfect, as is the subtle use of color and clever subcaptioned dialogue throughout.
Director: Joseph Briffa
Watch: [Flash]
A superbly-directed examination of spousal abuse and it’s irreversible effect on a relationship, as soundtracked by three brilliant cuts (”Operated On”, “Evil Has Never” and “Lick Black Gold”) from Union of Knives under-appreciated debut LP, Violence & Birdsong. Unfortunately, the video is unavailable for download anywhere and Briffa (at the mandate of the label) was unable to supply me with a downloadable version as its currently being reworked into one singular video for the next single for Knives, due out soon. So instead I must direct you HERE, where you can watch a high(ish)-resolution, good-quality version of the video on Union of Knives’ embedded flash player. Trust me, it’s worth it.
Director: Melissa Olson
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
The first-ever official video from those mysterious Boards of Canada fellows gets their music video career off to a great start, as their hotly-anticipated video for “Dayvan Cowboy”, directed by Melissa Olson, is moving in its epic brilliance. “Dayvan Cowboy” is my favorite Boards of Canada song, and it always evokes a strong feeling of exploration for me (underwater in a sub, if you must know), and the video embodies this exact same feeling. Compiled of brilliantly-composed stock footage (why am I not surprised that Boards of Canada are collectors of stock footage?), everything works well together in sync with the progress of the song. Antville user vidbot puts it best in his response to the video: “There is no overarching artistic message in this video, you’re just meant to go with it. Its about pure sensation - visceral, tactile real world input that overwhelms the senses and goes beyond verbal or written explanation. Consciousness-expanding euphoria”. Sounds good to me.
Director: Michel Gondry
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
With last Summer’s release of his masterful fourth feature film, The Science of Sleep, and the completion of his next motion picture, Be Kind Rewind, it’s easy to understand why, as far as actual music video output was concerned, 2006 was a slow year for the greatest mind in music video history. However, the one video he did manage to put out, for Beck’s “Cell Phone’s Dead”, in between silver screen endeavors was a great one, in which German Expressionist and Film Noir elements converge to add up to a beautiful clip of black and white perfection and the special effects wizardry we’ve come to know and love from Gondry.
Director: SAAM
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
For my money, London newcomer Saam Farahmand was the best music video director of 2006, bursting on the scene out of nowhere to drop countless brilliant, low-budget videos for the UK’s hottest up-and-coming bands. There were his flawless videos for Klaxons (see 15, 17, 19 and 22), his awesome clips for buzzworthy girl-groups Dead Disco and New Young Pony Club, and that incredible, incredible video for Simian Mobile Disco. But above them all was his oddball masterpiece for Good Shoes’ “All In My Head”, which revolves around the band’s proficiency for random stupid human tricks and the use of an awesome zoetrope/turntable effect.
Director: Emmanuel Ho (The Owl) | Motomichi Nakamura (Mother’s Health)
Watch: The Owl: [YouTube] | Mother’s Health: [YouTube]
Download: The Owl: [Quicktime] | Mother’s Health: [Quicktime]
Emmanuel Ho and Motomichi Nakamura’s 2-D animation masterpieces - for I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness’ “The Owl” and the Knife’s “We Share Our Mother’s Health”, respectively - stand out head and shoulders above the competition as the year’s best animated videos, and both clips are worthy of inclusion among the greatest animated videos of all time.
Ho’s clip for “The Owl” is wrought with tangible drama and stark, beautiful visuals that are paired perfectly with the stirring music of ILYBICD’s two-and-a-half minute instrumental track. The ominous chords build and build as an entrapped crow struggles towards the light until the owl is revealed, all dark, mysterious fur and piercing eyes. The tormented flight of the crow is depicted for a few more seconds as black objects fall against a pristine white background around him before Ho zooms in on the penetrating stare of the owl and the video ends just as ominously as it began.
Nakamura’s clip, on the other hand, features stark 2-D animation similar to that of Ho’s video, but lacks the drama and atmosphere of “The Owl”, making up for it with astonishing creativity and a aggressively severe red-black-white color scheme. The Knife have consistently put out excellent videos, but Nakamura’s vision just might be the best yet. Like I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness and “The Owl”, the Knife provide the perfect track for this kind of video, but it’s Nakamura’s animation that completely steals the show. It’s got a lot of shit going on and it’s pretty fucked up in general, so I’m not even going to venture a guess as to what exactly the concept or storyline behind this video is, but thankfully Nakamura explains himself in this excerpt, taken from his website:
“The animation starts with a girl that wakes up from a long sleep and starts searching for a sacred apple. At the end of a nightmarish story the girl is able to find her apple but only to discover the real price that she has to pay for it.
This was def. one of the best projects that I have worked on. The band gave me full creative freedom and they were very happy with the result. One of the film’s concepts was to express pain in suggestive ways. Funny thing is that coincidently I had undergone nasal and septal surgery at the beginning of the project, and because of that I was in pain and my nose was still bleeding during the first two weeks of production (sorry for being so graphic…).”
I’d make fun of the girl for sacrificing so much for a fucking apple, but I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been seduced by a sacred apple on countless occasions throughout my life.
Director: SAAM
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
The most exciting director of 2006, Saam Farahmand, proved on countless occasions last year that he could produce an awesome video on even the most shoestring of budgets, but his video for Klaxons’ “Golden Skans” allowed him to show just how incredible things are when you give Saam some financial headroom with which to breathe more life into his creative visions. Klaxons built their sound from the ground up on raw energy and a general feeling of out-of-control intensity, but “Golden Skans” - the lead single from their upcoming debut album, Myths of the Near Future - sees them realizing their potential as a pop band fully able to bring the charts to their knees. Granted, it’s a much more polished, tightly-produced sound, but where many of their contemporaries have seen glossy production suck the life out of their music, James Ford’s slick work behind the boards proves just how dangerous Klaxons are as a pop band primed for world domination obliteration. It’s not a surprising evolution given its the band’s second single since signing to major UK label Polydor (and the one given the task as the LP’s lead single of generating sufficient hype for the album), and with their newfound major-label status also comes an increased video budget for Farahmand to have a creative field day with. SAAM takes the apocalyptic sci-fi subject matter of the song and runs with it, creating an outer-space epic in which the three members of Klaxons work to destroy the light that will eventually destroy them. Yeah, it lacks the edge of his earlier work for the band and his other videos of ‘06, but it’s far and away his most beautiful and most ambitious project to date and it succeeds on all accounts.
Director: David Mould
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
An exercise in post-production wizardry and the trials and tribulations of the sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll lifestyle of life on the road in a popular rock band, David Mould’s video for “Meds” is one of the year’s best, despite being filmed in no time during the band’s actual touring schedule.
Director: SAAM
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Remember that raw, edgy vibe I mentioned in discussing Saam’s work prior to the “Magick” and “Golden Skans” videos? This is exactly what I’m talking about. His first brilliant video, “Gravity’s Rainbow” dropped in early ‘06 and succeeded on the strength of Saam’s cheap visual trickery and its crude, anti-budget aesthetic.
Director: Ashley Dean
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
iLiKETRAiNS are an interesting bunch of British gentleman who write extremely melodramatic, atmospheric and orchestral rock songs about long-forgotten events with a Sufjan-esque historical accuracy. They also release brilliant videos to accompany said tracks, like this one directed by the band’s own Ashley Dean (who rocks the cornet and is in charge of all of the band’s artistic endeavors), which revolves around the failed 1912 Antarctic expedition (undertaken on his trusty ship, the Terra Nova) of one Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Easily the most emotionally moving video of the year, Ashley Dean manages to create a stirring epic using miniature sets and characters who are barely more than glorified stick figures; a remarkable feat indeed.
Director: SAAM
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
My mere status as a straight, immature male has me inclined to declare Simian Mobile Disco’s new video for “Hustler”, THE MOST BRILLIANT MUSIC VIDEO EVER CREATED without even the slightest bit of hesitation, but I’ll see if I can do a little bit better than that. Director Saam Farahmand, making his fourth appearance on the list already, represents here with his most bad-ass video yet, hot on the heels of his excellent vids for UK buzz bands Good Shoes (“All In My Head”) and New Young Pony Club (“Ice Cream”). Simian Mobile Disco’s “Hustler” is one of the smoothest, sexiest songs of 2006, smacking of bravado from start to finish (in a good way) and keeping the shit hot on dancefloors across Europe until the early hours of the morning on a regular basis (or so I’m told). Thus, it’s only appropriate that Farahmand hook it up with the hottest music video of 2006, and he does so, bringing the sexy in spades along the way. I won’t spoil the surprise, but let’s just say the world might be a better place if all games of telephone ended like this.
Director: Jonas Euvremer & Francois Rousselet
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
“Testarossa” is the first entry in the saga of Kavinsky, a young man who died in a high-speed car accident in 1986, only to be resurrected as a zombie to avenge his death and drop some ridiculously hot electronica tracks for us along the way. The animation is brilliant, falling somewhere between Sin City and those vintage, early 90’s-era Nintendo graphics, while the track itself sounds like a 21st century battle between the themes of Night Rider, Miami Vice and Beverly Hills Cop. Look for Kavinsky to carry on the torch for revolutionary French electro-house artists in 2007, side by side with Justice, SebastiAn and the rest of the Ed Banger/Institubes collective.
Director: Nima Nourizadeh
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Bomb-ass green-screenery courtesy of Hot Chip and director Nima Nourizadeh on one of the hottest tracks of the year. Extremely clever concept and brilliant execution; hotness all around.
Director: SAAM
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Guess who? It’s SAAM and Klaxons here again for their third collaborative appearance in the Top 25. If his “Golden Skans” video stands as Exhibit A for what Saam can do when given a decent budget to work with, then this is a triumphant-ass Exhibit B. “Magick” finds Klaxons at their darkest and most ominous, and Saam’s neon-slime treatment, complete with the development of a K-shaped stigmata on the band member’s hands, is perfect for the band’s artistic vision. No one can deny that Klaxons and neon (specifically glowsticks) go together better than Bono and sunglasses, and Saam makes sure you don’t forget it with a video that, well, you probably couldn’t forget if your life depended on it.
Director: Adam Bizanski
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
For a technique as over-used and played-out as stop motion animation was in 2006, Adam Bizanski sure found inventive ways to incorporate it into his videos over and over again. The best of the bunch was easily his video for Wolf Parade’s “Modern World”, in which Bizanski does perfect justice to an excellent Wolf Parade track with beautiful set design, performance scenes with painstaking attention to detail and a clever storyline that ties in perfectly with the themes of the song.
Director: Sigur Ros
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
After waiting on pins and needles for months, my eyes were finally graced by the beauty that is Sigur Ros’ latest last April and while it doesn’t eclipse the brilliance of their earlier videos, it certainly upholds the high standard maintained throughout all of the Ros’ videography. “Saeglopur” also marks the first time Sigur Ros, a band who clearly values their music videos and cinema as an art form, have directed their own video, with a little help from animation specialists The Mill. The video for “Saeglopur” (which translates in English to either “lost at sea” or “sea-wanderer”) was described as a “sea-faring epic” by the band on their site late last year when they first hinted at its release and the clip is just that. The video opens as a mother watches her son wading into the ocean from the shore. Once in the water, the boy dives under and discovers a lush underwater environment rife with intimidating sea creatures, and he\’s chased by a tentacled creature to what he presumes is safety, only to get tragically tangled and caught in the seaweed.
The entire video has a wonderfully ominous, murky and grainy feel, and the animation is superb on The Mill’s part, all adding up to create the sad, tragic atmosphere in which the video takes place. Everything is timed perfectly with the rhythm of the music - the boy’s submergence underwater as the percussion comes in, the uplifting strings as the bubbles rise up and clear to reveal a scuba diver in the water, and the video just works really well as a whole. Many have expressed disappointment with this, Sigur Ros’ first foray into the technical side of music videos, but while I’ll agree that it doesn’t surpass the brilliance of their earlier videos, it’s certainly deserving of any praise it gets and is possibly the best band-directed video of all time. For much more specific information and insight into how exactly the video was created, hit up this interesting-ass article posted on The Mill’s website here.
Director: Lawrence Klein
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Holy. Fucking. Shit. I grappled with where to place this video on the countdown more than anything else on here. One minute, I thought it might be the best thing I’d ever seen; another, I never wanted to watch it again. No doubt Lawrence Klein did a fucking masterful job as the director on this one, capturing a dark, grimy intensity not found in any other video this year, but part of me wonders if he may have taken things too far at times. I nearly put this in the Top 10, but at the end of the day I feel like the climactic final scene is just too gratuitous and Klein just tries too hard to force the clip’s edginess on the viewer. It doesn’t help that anyone I played it for responded with a “Why the fuck did you show me that?”, but the fact remains that it’s a deeply moving thriller of a video; a work of beautifully dark outsider art. Disturbing yes, but worth it if you can get past the gore and appreciate it for what it is.
Director: Otaku-House
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Otaku House, who scored big with his video for the Decemberist’s “16 Military Wives” last year, directs this beautiful split-screen clip for the Album Leaf’s “Always For You”, which features beautiful color values and the year’s best editing, hands down.
Director: Martin De Thurah
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
In late ‘04 and into 2005 British post-punkers the Futureheads made a name for themselves as the world’s exciting new band, releasing a self-titled debut LP on which they demonstrated an incredible knack for multiple-part harmonies and pop songs that we equal parts blistering and blissful. In 2005, up-and-coming Norwegian director Martin De Thurah made a name for himself as the world’s best and most exciting new director, releasing two remarkable videos (for Carpark North’s “Human” and Royksopp’s “What Else Is There”) in which he demonstrated an incredible knack for dark atmospherics and tangible intensity. However, the output of both was disappointing in 2006 after such high expectations were set the year before. The Futureheads released a decidedly lackluster and - dare I say - kind of boring sophomore LP, News & Tributes, while De Thurah only managed to put out two videos, neither of which came close to matching the incredible heights he reached in ‘05. That said, however, the Futureheads’ “Skip To The End” is a pretty solid - if unspectacular - lead single and De Thurah’s video for the track - his first for a non-Danish band - is still one of the year’s best despite its inability to rival the excellence of his earlier work. Somehow he continually displays an incredible ability for breathtaking cinematography and ambience, so despite a relative slump year in ‘06 there’s no denying the guy’s got a ridiculously bright future ahead of him in this business.
Director: Keith Schofield
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Somewhere it’s written that every new band must start out with some kind of performance-based piece for their music video debut. Thus, we end up with thousands upon thousands of boring, run-of-the-mill clips of band’s, y’know, playing their instruments in a room and stuff (memo to Bloc Party: it doesn’t have to be this way!). However, every year you get a bunch of great videos from new bands featuring interesting takes on the performance-footage genre. Case in point: directing team Keith Schofield’s awesome video for up-and-coming Belgian electro-rockers Goose. Crazy optical illusion shit abound here, as Keith Schofield employs the Ames Trapezoid effect (something that has to do with that spinning window thing) and some crazy “4-D” effects that create those awesome body-bending shots.
Director: Ace Norton
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Though it’s a technique that’s been done before, most notably in The Thrills excellent 2005 clip for “The Irish Keep Gatecrashing”, Norton employs it to better here, not only creating an awesome visual effect but also using crafty camera work to impart a narrative onto the video. The clip opens with a young couple frolicking and doing the whole couple thing in a golden field, before the camera takes off on a high-speed forward-tracking journey through the city, taking us through houses, down drains, under water, and into parties and debaucherous bedrooms. We are shown all of the different aspects and variants of love, as we move from the couple in the opening scene (in which the camera comes to focus on the girl’s bracelet before taking off into the woods a split second later), to the same girl from that scene with another man in bed at a party (we know this because, subtly, Norton has the camera linger on her bracelet for another fleeting moment in this second scene), to the one-night-stands taking place throughout the house at the party and later an older man proposing to his girlfriend in a fancy restaurant. Finally, the closing scene shows an old woman in a hospital bed as her heartbeat flatlines and her elderly husband watches over here, helpless. As the man walks dazed from the room, the camera pans to the right in rhythm with one last swoon of the song’s majestic brass, and we see another young couple, holding each other’s hands in the same fashion as the couple in the opening scene did. With this final shot, the video comes full circle, and as one love is lost in the hospital room, another is being kindled just around the corner.
Director: Jon Watts & Sean Donnelly
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Yeah, it’s well-documented (here and elsewhere) that stop-motion animation was EVERYWHERE in ‘06, so it takes a brilliant clip like this one with an interesting hook (ice sculptures? fuck yeah!) to set itself apart from the rest of the pack.
Director: Jaron Albertin
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
I’ve always found those sprawling, depressing-as-shit suburban superstores (you know, the kind I had to deal with all the fucking time at UVA) kind of really creepy. Apparently, Jaron Albertin does too.
Director: Chris Milk
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
In an age where every single hip-hop video is exactly the same (large posse + women with exaggerated figures dancing + hot rides [somewhat optional] = every current hip-hop video), Kanye has consistently put out quality videos, and “Touch The Sky” is no exception. The video is beautifully filmed with 70’s vintage cinematography and stars Mr. West as Evel Kanyeval, and focuses one the final hours before he attempts to launch himself across the Grand Canyon and literally “touch the sky”. It’s very well done and features a pretty decent performance by Pamela Anderson as Kanyeval’s girl, a reference to the “as soon he get off, he leave your ass for a white girl” line from “Gold Digger”. The video is nothing short of an extavaganza, clocking in at over five minutes (the actual song is 3:27), and easily the best video put out by Kanye or Milk since the duo first teamed up on 2004’s “All Falls Down”.
Director: Family
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Directing team Family have done a wonderful job of establishing a consistent aesthetic throughout their videos (see “All He Needs” at #__ as well) predicated on the look of mid-western, early-90’s kitsch most recently made famous by Jared Hess and company in Napoleon Dynamite. Here they apply it to the video for Australian electro-poppers (rockers?) Van She’s “Kelly”, documenting a bunch of girls named, uh, Kelly getting all makey-outy with their boyfriends as Van She performs on TV in the background of their classically-American, Virgin Suicides-esque bedrooms.
Director: Andreas Nilsson
Watch: Like A Pen: [YouTube] | Silent Shout: [YouTube]
Download: Like A Pen: [Quicktime] | Silent Shout: [Quicktime]
2006 was the year that the Knife stole the crown from Sigur Ros as the world’s best video band, releasing four superb videos, unleashing an unprecedented audio-visual experience of a live show on the thousands of fans who were lucky enough to catch them on their brief jaunt across the Western Hemisphere and subsequently releasing a live DVD, Silent Shout: An Audio-Visual Experience, for those who missed their 1000% sold out performances. We’ve already covered Moto Natsumara’s animated masterpiece for “We Share Our Mother’s Health” (see #14b), but Andreas Nilsson was at the helm for not one, but two of the band’s finest videos to date: “Like A Pen” and “Silent Shout”. Both are a combination of animation and live action, and yes, both are weird as shit - but would you expect anything less from the world’s most strange and mysterious band?
Director: Ben Rollason
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
More in-front-the-camera trickery from Rollason again here on this excellent video for Battle’s “Children”, though the track was the weakest of the band’s three singles in 2006. Would have ranked far higher if not for the slightly-off putting acting performance by lead singer Jason Bavanandan and the rest of the band, which just felt a bit awkward and irksome at times.
Director: Daniel Wolfe
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
The two best videos of 2005 both featured remarkable performances by children who likely had little to no proper acting experience (though it’s a bit less likely in the case of “Glosoli”), and rookie director Daniel Wolfe executes the same formula to perfection again here. Gritty, intense, real and tragic, the video shows the scary, but inevitable world of juvenile delinquency in an environment bereft of parents and adult guidance, reinforcing the lyrical theme of the stirring track by Ms. Dynamite.
Director: Dougal Wilson
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
This video has it all: Russian kick-dancing. Bearsuits. Russian kick-dancing in bear suits. You can’t really ask for more, but for those who still aren’t sold it’s also got a beautiful pop star, a wonderfully subtle color scheme and it’s one of Dougal Wilson’s best videos yet.
Director: Oliver Evans
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Thank god for Klaxons. And neon. And lasers. And neon Christmas sweaters. And neon chalk animation. And this video by Oliver Evans, even though it can’t quite touch the SAAM-directed Klaxons videos (see #’s 15, 17 and 22) that preceded it.
Director: Mina Song (Version 1) | Robert Hales (Version 2)
Watch: Version 1: [YouTube] | Version 2: [YouTube]
Download: Version 1: [Quicktime] | Version 2: [Quicktime]
“Crazy” saw two excellent interpretations of a stellar treatment when it was released this past spring. First, Mina Song directed a constantly-tracking animated video relying on dirty textures and blended layers for the song’s UK release (where it set a record on the British charts as the only song ever to go to #1 on downloads only before seeing an actual physical release). Then, as the song was being prepped for release as a single in the US, they shot another video with HSI heavyweight Thomas Hales at the helm, who took the same concept and added an ink-blot twist on it, as well as throwing animations of Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo into the mix, because God knows us MTV-watching Americans can’t deal with a video if the band’s not in it. Either way though, it’s great, though I’m going to have to give the slight edge to Hales’ more polished, less wandering version.
Director: Corin Hardy
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Shadowboxing excellence for the latest single from 2006’s best new band. What the fuck is up with the new version of the song, though?
Director: Don Cameron (Minimal) | Paul Hunter (My Love)
Watch: Minimal: [YouTube] | My Love: [YouTube]
Download: Minimal: [Quicktime] | My Love: [Quicktime]
Hmmm… what’s going on here? Two videos, two different directors, two different production companies, one treatment. I know what they say about great minds and all, but Don Cameron and Paul Hunter are either sharing brainwaves or something fishy is going on. Both are great videos nonetheless, all slick grandeur, stark lighting, minimalistic set design and glossy finish, but it’s the breathtaking choreography that seals the deal in both.
Director: Nia Vaughn
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Drawing inspiration from the extraneous playground chatter that opens the track, director Nia Vaughn has created a video that succeeds on every level thanks to its appropriateness for the track despite not doing anything terribly new or groundbreaking. A simple, straightforward, incredibly-fitting video for the best song of 2006.
Director: Anthony Mandler
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Whether you liked it or not, the Killers made their triumphant(?) return to music last year with a surprisingly good new single, “When You Were Young”, though the rest album floundered by all accounts. Though the track might not initially scream “gritty Mexican love-and-betrayal melodrama”, director Anthony Mandler makes the video work incredibly well, seamlessly transitioning between the dramatic storyline and well-executed performance footage (seriously, would the Killers not have performance footage?). Epic, mountaintop shots of the Tlayacapan plains open the clip as a frantic husband races to his distressed spouse. Through flashbacks and a non-linear storyboard, we are shown his infidelity and his wife’s distraught reaction, as she closes her eyes and remembers “when [she was] young” flashing back to their wedding day and happier times. Then we’re “treated” to some Killers performance footage, featuring B-Flowers rocking an mustache as overgrown as his ego is overinflated as the band performs in a run-down Mexican bar. A resolution is ultimately reached, though it’s not exactly clear what it is (so wait, after all that she just forgives him?), and the husband leaves the dirty whore he cheated with for his apparently quick-to-forgive wife, as they walk arm in arm out of the bar and the Killers performance comes to a close. Not the best video in the last 20 years or anything, but very impressive nonetheless. Available for download for the first time exclusively on Good Weather For Airstrikes.
Director: OneInThree
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Fun with cut-outs and shapes for up-and-coming British electro-poppers I Was A Cub Scout, courtesy of brand new Colonel Blimp acquisition OneInThree.
Director: Ace Norton
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
For “Crooked Teeth”, Ace Norton, who also contributed a video for “Someday You Will Be Loved” to DCFC’s Directions series, directs a brilliant homage to Peter Gabriel’s 1987 stop-animation classic video for “Sledgehammer” (which you can and should watch or download here). Norton takes many of the tricks used in the “Sledgehammer” video, which was directed by Stephen Montmus, modifying them slightly and of course adding a modern polish to wonderfully entertaining effect, creating a video that works perfectly for the song. I especially love the part where the blended guitar effect (at the 2:33 mark of the song) perfectly coincides with Ben Gibbard’s perfectly round head (seriously, it’s geometrically flawless) getting swirled in a blender. All in all it’s a really enjoyable video and one of Death Cab’s best to date.
Director: Terri Timely
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
The Exit are a vocal and lyrical double threat with singers/lyricists Jeff DaRosa and Ben Brewer each offering their own sound and unique style, with the former’s lyrics leaning more towards the introspective and the latter’s offering a more bold and aggressive point of view. Brewer’s in charge on this track, and the video follows him in continuous motion as he extricates himself from a car crash and walks through a series of doors, each opening into a different scene, as he deals with lust and its repercussions. Terri Timely are proving themselves to be an excellent up-and-coming team of directors, and this one only further enforces that notion.
Director: Family
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Family do it again with this documentary-style, homoerotic roller-rink romance shot-for-shot parody of Air’s 1998 video for “All I Need”, set to a cover of the track by C-E2. The “HONK IF YOU’RE A BLADER” bumper sticker totally makes this video.
Director: Jonathan Harris
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
British newcomer Jonathan Harris shines in his music video debut here, directing a gem of a clip that’s another perfect example of how the generally-stale performance footage genre can be kept exciting on little-to-no budget using nothing more than some interesting camera techniques and a little innovation. Harris does a brilliant job of using soft, diffuse lighting for the performance shots inter-cut with beautiful footage of rolling Mancunian sunrises and sunsets to translate one of the year’s best songs to film.
Director: Ramon Bloomberg
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime]
Director Ramon Bloomberg, who’s one of the hottest young names in the music video business, came to me last summer with the opportunity to premier his video for “Hands”, and I was quite flattered as it’s an excellent clip. A very clever play on the “Hands” title of the song, the video follows the Raconteurs (and this awesome magician fellow) as they break free from jail and seek asylum in a school for young deaf girls. This is where the whole “Hands” thing comes in, as the only way to communicate with these girls is via sign language, thus everything comes full circle and we all go “Hey, that’s clever” and everyone wins. Finally, the video provides evidence of the Raconteurs extreme rocking ability, as even the deaf and hearing impaired can get in on the rocking-out action. Look for Bloomberg to have a massive year in ‘07.
Director: Dougal Wilson
Watch: Don’t Let Him Waste: [YouTube] | Nothing’s Going To Change: [YouTube]
Download: Don’t Let Him Waste: [Quicktime] | Nothing’s Going To Change: [YouTube]
The second half of ‘06 saw Dougal Wilson stuck in a bit of an automotive phase, as he put out two consecutive videos with based around cars and transport. The finer of the two (by a hair), “Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time” is Crazy Taxi for the indie-rock set, while his clip for Badly Drawn Boy’s “Nothing’s Gonna Change Your Mind” is a charming video in which Damon Gough travels across England in his keyboard-powered automobile guided by a map of music notes, before the video climaxes in a glorious car wash scene, complete with cartwheeling cloth scrubbers and general sun-drenched merriment.
And that’s that. Unlike last year (when I hosted all of the videos and the resulting traffic managed to crash ezarchives servers and take the working video links with them), nearly all of the videos are externally hosted, so we shouldn’t have too much trouble with malfunctioning links this time around. Of course, this post took foreve and I’m exhausted, so I very well may have made some cut-and-pasting mistakes; just let me know of any defective links in the comments and I’ll do my best to get on it. Also, unlike the almighty Shots Ring Out, I have not yet set up any mass download options or created a torrent of all the videos, but I will be doing the latter in the next day or two, so just sit tight for a bit if mass-downloading is your thing. Finally, I’d like to thank Antville, without whom this list wouldn’t be possible, and Shots Ring Out, for leading the way in unique downloadable music video content in the blogosphere. And of course, I must thank you reader folk for being patient and sticking it out - I know near-interminable periods of time passed between the last few posts and I really would like to thank you for your patience and understanding. Top 50 Tracks of 2006 coming on the 31st and then it’s onwards and upwards from there in 2007; I’m out.