It’s hot as hell in my apartment right now and I can’t sleep, so I thought to myself “Why not watch some music videos?” And what’s better to watch when you’re feeling the heat than a summery music video? Well, probably something that dealt with snow and ice, I imagine. Still, this video definitely fits the summer theme, using found footage from an institutional promo for a Portuguese theme park called “OndaParque”. You’ve got to love videos like these featuring young people having fun on VHS in the 80’s and 90’s. There is some brief, slightly-obscured female nudity in this video though, so just be forewarned that it is sNSFW.
My favorite new discovery, Robots With Rayguns, couldn’t wait until this fall to give us a taste of their new album, so they decided to release their newest single “Bedhead” early, and boy, it’s a doozy. Add to that a video featuring some fantastic Soul Train footage and you’re in for a great time. Grab the track for free on their Bandcamp page.
I already posted this video of Grimes’ performance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on my Facebook page, so if you saw it there, this is just a repeat. But that video was streaming from NBC’s piece of crap video player, which sucks ass, so if you’d like to see a better quality version of that amazing performance here’s the Hulu link. I’ve seen plenty of videos of her playing this song live and I don’t think her voice has ever sounded better than it does here. And make sure you watch the video all the way until the end to see some classic Grimes awkwardness.
All apologies for not posting much the last few weeks, but like many people around the world I caught bad case of Olympic fever. Because we could have the Games on at work I was easily watching on average 12 hours of coverage every day, which didn’t leave a whole lot of time for searching out new music.
For me the musical highlight from those two weeks actually came from the start of Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony. I was extremely excited when I heard months ago that one of my favorite bands of all time, Underworld, was going to do the soundtrack to the Opening Ceremony, and boy, did they not disappoint. The high point of the whole ceremony came towards the very beginning of the show with the transition from the pastoral English countryside to the industrialized England that helped bring the world into the modern era, culminating in the forging of a giant ring that was raised above the stadium to join four others and create the Olympic rings. The spectacle of that was impressive enough in its own right, but it was taken to extreme levels of jaw-dropping amazingness by Underworld’s epic 15 minute long song “And I Will Kiss”. This is probably my favorite thing Underworld has done in at least a decade and, for me at least, this sequence triumphed over anything we saw in Beijing’s much talked about Opening Ceremony. Stunning, just stunning.
It’s hard to get any great footage of the entire sequence because NBC sucks and the Olympic Committee are Nazis when it comes to unauthorized use of their broadcasts, but here is a pretty decent five minute clip of the rings being raised, shot by someone sitting in the stadium.
And here’s the whole song with some decent photos from the whole sequence for those who want to hear the whole glorious thing start to finish.
If you haven’t already taken a guess from the song title alone, you should probably know that this video is NSFW as it contains footage of female nudity from the VHS era of porn. With that said, you don’t actually see that much naughty business in the video, as a lot of the negative space in the footage is covered up with VHS electronic static that’s cleverly synced to the beat of the song. The effect works amazingly well with the distorted, played-in-reverse nature of the song, playing up the sexiness of its sound while accentuating and downplaying at the same time its skeeziness. It’s a really effective artistic use of found footage.
This morning a fan vid for the TSTR remix of Robots With Rayguns’ “Tracy Freeland” appeared on the interwebs, using footage from the little seen early Schwarzenegger mini-classic, Raw Deal. Even though this video basically shows you the whole end of the movie I’m not sure I’d call this video a spoiler if you were still planning on watching the film, because if you hadn’t already guessed that Schwarzenegger would shoot everyone at the end of the movie, then you’re really, really bad at guessing how movies end.
For those who like dancing in their retro synth-based electronic dance videos instead of mass murder, here’s the video for Robots With Rayguns’ “Change of Heart”, featuring footage from Breakin’ and Dirty Dancing, among other things. I kind of want to learn how to bust out some of these dance moves. And if you haven’t already done so, you should really download Robots With Rayguns’ free album, ‘Electro Isn’t Dead’ from their BandCamp page. It’s amazing and it’s free!
I discovered Groundislava through Clive Tanaka and his participation on this track off of the ‘TV Dream’ EP. Tanaka consistently seems to be involved in awesome-sauce amazingness, and this song is no exception. I don’t know what to make of this video except for the fact that it goes perfectly with the appropriately trippy, retro, spaced-out sonics of the song. I really have no idea what is suppose to be happening in this video, but you can’t say that the visuals don’t fit the music perfectly. “TV Dream” is one of my favorite new discoveries in a while.
I had the pleasure of seeing Seattle’s own Beat Connection at the Capital Hill Block Party last weekend (and the displeasure of losing some of my hearing in my left ear to the speakers we were standing right next to) and they put on a darn good show. One of the highlights for me was this track, “The Palace Garden, 4am” off of their upcoming new album, ‘The Palace Garden’. It’s a really fun, laid back yet upbeat and bouncy song. The only thing I don’t like about this band is the lead singer’s face. For some reason I really want to punch it. Bad. But otherwise, this is an awesome song.
I’m about to fall asleep here at work and I guess this song isn’t really helping matters much, but it’s just so darn pretty that I had to share. Hammock’s dreamy, ethereal song “Tape Recorder” so soothing that it just melts all the stress right out of your body. Those tapes filled with whale and rain forest sounds can go suck it.
While the rest of the nation is apparently boiling alive, it’s freezing cold in Seattle for some reason, which I guess put me in the mood for something vaguely reminiscent of summer. In enters this video for DIIV’s “Follow”, which was compiled using footage “from every summer ever.” Let this surrogate summer begin!
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