Good Weather For Airstrikes

NOTE: Redskins lost. 19-16, wide right. It was painful. Let’s not talk about it. I imagine the lack of a Music Video Monday was painful for all y’all yesterday as well (or, y’know, you survived just fine without it), so to rectify that situation, I’ll be posting the two best videos I’ve seen all week here today. Here’s the first one.

The Exit have been on my radar ever since I saw them open for RX Bandits in Baltimore like two summers ago, and I’ve since had the good/coincidental luck of seeing them two more times, most recently opening for Ted Leo and those crazy Pharmacists last December in New York. They’re live show was consistently awesome and despite being but a mere three piece they bring the intensity in spades, especially on “Don’t Push”, my favorite track by the band. After seeing the Terri Timely-directed video for Bobby Birdman’s “I Will Come Again” over at Shots Ring Out, I was perusing the Terri Timely website only to find that they’d recently completed a video for the track, which is awesome. It’s reminded me of both a) how awesome the song is and b) how consistently-great the Terri Timely videos are (check them out for yourself at their website, their clip for Laura Veir’s “Galaxies” is especially awesome).

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 as an excellent up-and-coming team of directors, and this one only further enforces that notion.

Video: “Don’t Push” - The Exit
Director: Terri Timely: Video Band
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime] [iPod]
MP3: “Don’t Push” - The Exit

After that look to the past, let’s jump back to 2006 for one of the year’s best, the first Thom Yorke video off of his incredible solo, er, not solo debut, The Eraser. Directed by Chel White, the video employs groundbreaking Smallgantics technology to create breathtaking contiuously-tracking aerial shots, which are set up from the point of view of a bald eagle flying over the land below. Greedy hands grab at and try to compromise the eagle’s flight (thereby compromising it’s freedom), as it flies over a desperate man lying on top of a skyscraper and a protest below. Before too long White cuts to eerily dark and blurred stock footage of violent riot footage, further enhancing the dark and unsettling overtones of the clip. In the final minute, all of a sudden the stock footage abruptly transitions in time with the music to footage of Thom drowning as he meets the camera with a stoic gaze. Here’s to drowning in the icy throes of capitalism!

Video: “Harrowdown Hill” - Thom Yorke
Director: Chel White
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime] [iPod]

Joseph Kahn’s epic video for Muse’s “Knights Of Cydonia” was pretty well-received when I posted it to kick of the first Music Video Monday last week, so here’s another one of Kahn’s classic videos, for the Chemical Bros’ “Get Yourself High” (featuring K-Os on the verses), which relies on the same general realistically-recreate-kitschy-nostalgia-film-style-with-futuristic-updates principle as his clip for “Cydonia” did. This time around, we’ve got everyone’s favorite genre (after futuristic westerns of course), 70’s ninja films! Kahn does an incredible job here, recreating (or is it original footage that’s doctored, I honestly have no idea) the exact style of those classic kung-fu films, incorporating relevant elements like headphones, records, and boomboxes into the mix, all the while timing everything perfectly in sync with the music. For more on Kahn, here’s a great Q&A with him courtesy of Director-File.com.

Video: “Get Yourself High” - Chemical Brothers (ft. K-Os)
Director: Joseph Kahn
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime] [iPod]

Props to ClipTip for the heads up on this video, which is a fabulousness overload courtesy of the Scissor Sisters. The always-poptastic Sisters return here with the video for “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing”, the lead single from their upcoming album, Ta-Dah, which has already has UK dancefloors abuzz for a few weeks now. The video is a true sensory overload from the start, with at least three planes of action going on in every frame and no color in the entire visual spectrum going unused. There’s not much more to say, other than that I’m pretty sure this looks like what ecstasy feels like, but either way it’s an impressive clip.

Video: “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing” - Scissor Sisters
Director: Andy Soup
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime] [iPod]

The single release of the song also features the return of the inimitable Erol Alkan, who chips in his “Carnival Of Light Re-work” to the song’s already impressive list of remixes. As usual, Alkan takes the track and completely reinvents it into a sprawling, expansive space filled by miles of reverb and the Sisters’ retro-futuristic synths and electronic booms and bips, spreading out the vocals so they’re few and far between so as to put the instrumentation in the spotlight.

Bonus MP3: “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing” (Carnival Of Light Re-work) - Scissor Sisters

NOTE: UVa certainly isn’t giving us the national holiday off and classes are in session as always, so don’t fret that I’m gonna skimp on the second installment of Music Video Mondays, which starts now.

It’s videos like Thomas Hilland’s “Eple” clip that make me wonder how much some directors must hate themselves in order to subject themselves to such a painstaking process as this video must have required. Hilland cut up what must have been hundreds of vintage postcards and pieced them together seamlessly, and the product is a video that keeps the viewer moving in continuous non-linear motion, through windows, doors, picture frames and more, all the while keeping them fully immersed in retro 80’s-era Norwegian nostalgia. “Eple” is one of my favorite songs of all time, so I’m happy to know it was given a video treatment as imaginative as the song itself. Impossible to describe or do justice with screen shots, so just download the video below to see for yourself.

Video: “Eple” - Royksopp
Director: Thomas Hilland
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime] [iPod]

Hilland went on to direct a second video for Royksopp, this time for “Sparks”, also off of the electronica duo’s stellar debut album, Melody A.M. It remains quite creative and continues with the continuous non-linear movement theme, this time forgoing the 2-D world of postcards for real-life apartment living, as the camera takes the viewer in, out, above and below rooms in a run-down apartment complex.

Video: “Sparks” - Royksopp
Director: Thomas Hilland
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime] [iPod]

We’ve already hailed “La Ritournelle” as one of the most beautiful songs of the last few years, but furthermore, even the two videos released for the song are great. The first clip is for the original track, released last year, and while it beautifully (and mysteriously) depicts the story of a man living in isolation and his memories of the woman who once accompanied him there, it’s the second clip, for Mr. Dan’s remix of the track, that is superior. Before getting into that though, below are the download links and info for the original video.

Video: “La Ritournelle” - Sebastien Tellier
Director: Mathieu Mantovani (?)
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime] [iPod]
MP3: “La Ritournelle” - Sebastien Tellier

To round off the first installment of Music Video Monday, here is my favorite new find, Ace Norton’s fantastic video for Mr. Dan’s equally-fantastic remix of “La Ritournelle”. Though it’s a technique that’s been done before, most notably in The Thrills excellent 2005 clip for “The Irish Keep Gatecrashing” (view here), Norton employs it to better effect here, not only creating an awesome visual effect but also using crafty camerawork to impart a narrative onto the video. The clip opens with a young couple frolicking and doing the 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 helplessly. As the man walks dazed from the room, the camera pans to the right in rhythm with one last swoon of the 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.

Video: “La Ritournelle” (Mr. Dan’s Magic Wand Remix) - Sebastien Tellier
Director: Ace Norton
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime] [iPod]
MP3: “La Ritournelle” (Mr. Dan’s Magic Wand Remix) - Sebastien Tellier

First of all, props to the only best music video blog out there, Shots Ring Out (formerly So Hot Right Now), for tipping me off on this here video. Wolf Parade is back here with their third video, an accomplishment considering Sub Pop tends to commission very few videos for bands on their label not named the Postal Service or the Shins, and while it’s not quite as good as their clip for “Modern World”, it’s got an impressive budget behind it (again an anomaly coming out of the Sub Pop camp) and is enjoyable nonetheless.

I’d be lying if I said I was able to really follow the plotline all that well, but it’s pretty to look at and whatnot. I mean, are we supposed to be favoring either one of these guys as the protagonist, or is director Matt Moroz just into that German Expressionist shit where good and evil are ambiguous and the viewer is left to their own devices to choose sides and come to their own conclusions? I mean, Victorian-era gunfights and smashing champagne glasses on the ground when you don’t feel like holding them anymore is bad-ass and all, but neither one of these guys really come off as someone you want to root for. Either way, the clip is beautifully shot in terms of tonality and cinematography, and director Matt Moroz does a great job creating a lovely Victorian set, and while the video as a whole is nothing to write home about, it’s an impressive cinematographic accomplishment and shows Moroz’s potential as a director.

Video: “I’ll Believe In Anything” - Wolf Parade
Director: Matt Moroz
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime] [iPod]

Further proving himself as a master of stop-motion animation (see his clips for Death Cab [“Crooked Teeth”], Smoosh [“La Pump”], and Sebastien Tellier [“La Ritournelle” remix] as well), up-and-coming director Ace Norton reminds us just how good he is at what he does again here with his video for The Faint’s “Desperate Guys”. Employing art supplies to wonderful effect once again as he did in his videos for Death Cab and Smoosh, Norton utilizes figure models and manipulates them so that they perform impressive choreographed dance moves. I mean, check out the bottom screen shot, he’s even got that one little guy rocking out with the headspin. These stop-motion videos always amaze me with their sheer attention to detail and the amount of effort that must have gone into setting up and choreographing every single frame, but Norton repeatedly comes back to the technique and seems to outdo himself every time.

Video: “Desperate Guys” - The Faint
Director: Ace Norton
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime] [iPod]

NOTE: Welcome to the first installment of music video mondays. Awh yeah.

Well this is a bit of a masterpiece, isn’t it? Seriously, this is one of the most brilliant clips to come along in a long, long time. It’s pretty much just one big WTF-fest… I mean, it’s a western set in the future with fucking lasers and shit. LASERS AND SHIT! That should be all I need to say to have you guys downloading away, but if not, maybe these screenshots can convince you:

…yeah, seriously.

Video: “Knights Of Cydonia” - Muse
Director: Joseph Kahn
Watch: [YouTube]
Download: [Quicktime] [iPod]

Though it got off to a bit of a slow start, 2006 has been shaping up to be a great year for music videos (though not yet quite as good as 2005), and seeing that Videoteque is now deceased, I’ll be using GWFAS as my outlet for distributing these clips. Deal with it.

The Knife have consistently put out excellent videos, and their newest clip for “We Share Our Mother’s Health” just might be the best of the bunch. This time out they’ve put creative control in the hands of brilliant Japanese animator Motomichi Nakamura, and the result is an absolutely stunning video that is easily one of the best animated music videos of the last five years. 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…).”

As usual, I’ve got the clip for you in Quicktime-compatible .mov format and I would have it in iPod format for y’alls, but my Quicktime Pro has decided it’s gonna front and refuse to convert it for me, sorry.
Video: “We Share Our Mother’s Health” - The Knife
Director: Motomichi Nakamura
Download: [Quicktime] [iPod]

For those music video fans and former Videoteque readers, I’ve got good news. Announcing… MUSIC VIDEO MONDAYS!!! Mondays at Good Weather For Airstrikes will now be chock full of music video goodness; that’s right, you’ll now get at least three or more great music videos every Monday to start the week off right. Holla at your boy.