With apologies to aspiring filmmakers everywhere, it’s next to impossible for anybody not named Michael Mann to make consumer-grade or even low-end professional-grade digital camera footage look as good as 35mm. Attempts to look cinematic on a budget tend to look, at best, like primetime TV, and at worst like someone’s failed film class opus. Musicians face the same problem when recording, but there’s a very common workaround: make it sound as shitty as possible deliberately, so that its badness becomes an active stylistic decision rather than an unfortunate mistake. Lo-fi music always sounds like we sense it was intended to sound; “professional”-sounding independent music, on the other hand, often appears to have missed the mark. Given the usual limitations, its surprising that more independent filmmakers don’t make self-consciously lo-fi films. The style is used ironically, of course—Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! runs on outmoded formats and tropes, and its badness is the punchline—but it’s nowhere near as popular an approach in film as it is in music.

The appeal of Silkken Laumann’s video for “On the Mend” isn’t just that it looks “bad,” but that its particular kind of badness isn’t overtly jokey—shot on an old analog camera, it highlights what’s beautiful about its own imperfections, and the end result is both serious and surprisingly impassioned. Your instinct might be to describe it as “‘80s-style,” but that’s sort of an anachronism, because music videos during the ’80s were still usually shot on film rather than video and in any case didn’t look quite like this. A more accurate comparison might be educational videos from the ’80s and early ’90s (especially those science ones the Boards of Canada claim to have been inspired by) and certain kinds of public-access TV, but even those strained for professionalism in a way that “On the Mend” sidesteps entirely. (Actually, the closest visual analog I can think of is Jean-Luc Godard’s experimental video essays from the mid-‘70s, but I might just be projecting.)

It helps that the song, a sonambulant chillwave track reminiscent of early Nite Jewel, is every bit as dreamy and nostalgic as its music video. A relatively new band based out of Ottawa, Silkken Laumann features both CMG-approved ambient musician Adam Saikaley and former Acorn leading man Rolf Klausener, and the combination has yielded unsurprisingly spectacular results. From playing gigs with YACHT and CFCF to assembling baile funk mixtapes to releasing songs and videos as good as “On the Mend,” Silkken Laumann are sort of spoiling Ottawa’s otherwise barren cultural landscape lately, and at this rate I’m concerned that our city will implode when these guys finally drop their debut LP. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Silkken Laumann

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Seven months after their great Summer of Indifference LP came out via Don Giovanni, Asbury Park’s Black Wine finally releases an official video for single “Through the Foam.” The song captures everything mighty about the band in about three minutes: chord progression ripped from Bob Mould’s catalog? Check. Instantly memorable vocal hooks? Oh yeah. Brutal ensemble playing? You had to ask? The video, in turn, present everything fun, goofy, and revelatory about the New Brunswick punk scene which raised their earlier bands: crowded illegal basement shows, communal support for hometown heroes, an unabashed love of cornball shit (in this instance it’s wrestling, in its WWE and Mexican guises), the grease trucks, drugs. It’s all wildly entertaining. Bonus points for featuring a house I’ve been drunk and/or high in way too often to count.

:: blackwine.bandcamp.com

⊙ Keyword Tags: Black Wine

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It was always only a matter of time before the Balconies stumbled upon a breakout single, and though it took a few years longer than I’d anticipated after the release of their self-titled debut in 2009, I think the time is finally upon the former Ottawa (now Toronto) threesome. Simply behold the TV-ready video for “Kill Count,” the polished, muscular centerpiece of their forthcoming sophomore EP, due out February 28th via Coalition/Warner.

The major label affiliation may help account for just how professional this whole thing looks and sounds, but it’s clear that whatever cash has been tossed their way for the gig will be paid back tenfold—“Kill Count” is exactly the kind of infectious confection mainstream indie networks propel to the nth degree of stardom, and if I hadn’t seen these guys cover “Age of Consent” in an unfinished Ottawan basement three years ago I’d assume they were celebrities of some variety already. They wear the fame they’re waiting for well, I mean, and the sheen that’s needed suits their style just fine. Look how comfortable they look here thrashing about before flood lights, all three hip but model-pretty, shot like an ad for something their key demo can’t afford. You don’t need a focus-group to tell you how appealingly marketable these guys are.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Balconies

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Music videos are so often such missed opportunities. Especially considering it’s a medium without much currency anymore, it’s astonishing how many bands play it safe, simply recreating a live performance or trading in the same old, tired clichés. Free as it is from narrative constraints, the music video genre would seem to provide almost limitless opportunities for a creatively hungry filmmaker. Animation in particular lends itself well to music: from Fantasia to “Paranoid Android,” we’ve all witnessed the breathtaking harmony the two can achieve when done properly. In fact, I still remember the first time I saw that “Paranoid Android” video, up at four in the morning to catch a bus for an 8th grade trip to Washington, D.C. I held in my breath as I watched, bewildered and lonely, feeling like I’d been slipped some mind-altering drug. Animation can have that power.

Similarly, I’ll probably always remember when I saw the video for Bill Callahan’s “America!”, as it was, appropriately, on the 4th of July, in between prepping all-American cookout food. The video was animated by members of the Austin-based art collective Okay Mountain, whose website indicates this is their first music video. And it’s a jaw-dropping, unequivocal success. It helps that “America!” is the kind of rambling, stream-of-consciousness song that just begs for its own video: Callahan maintains a hypnotic hold over the listener with an irresistible groove, spurts of erratic guitar, and his trademark, rich, deadpan vocals. The video drives that groove even deeper, using the song’s entrancing qualities to full effect.

“America!”’s protagonists, if you will, are a pair of cowboy boots and a cowboy hat (with no one attached) that stomp and float through the great American landscape. Intercutting these fluid adventures are any number of free-associative images: postcards flipping quickly over one another, scenes of a shuttle launch, birds swarming the Statue of Liberty, a preacher wagging a finger at his congregation. One of the most consistent themes here is the decay that threatens to undermine America’s beauty. A pleasant desert image pans to a cross section of the soil beneath, littered with bongs, beer cans, and bones, and in a surreal under-sea scene, fast food hangs suspended in the water like prey caught in a web. And as Callahan repeats “Ain’t enough to eat,” our cowboy-hat protagonist drifts over a desert dotted with beer can pyramids.

Like Callahan’s song, the genius of this video is its ability to skew American ideology just so; while appealing in some ways as a celebration, it’s also at times creepy and grotesque. Like pretty much all Americans on the fourth of July, its richly hued parade of a nation’s over-the-top iconography indulges in the signifier while shrugging off the signified. This is most blatant in the song’s brief breakdown, when an animated Callahan stands before an American flag wearing aviator shades. “I never served my country,” he admits, and exploding fireworks reflect in his lenses nonetheless.

Though there’s no shortage of subject matter to parse in this video, perhaps the most important thing about it is the way it embodies, wholly, those qualities that a music video should posses. It casts a spell over the viewer, who’s hypnotized by the satisfying click of image and sound, as together they weave a world both familiar and dreamlike, much more complex than the sum of its parts.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Bill Callahan

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You have to feel sorry for Jodie Whittaker, and when I say sorry, I don’t mean in a “you poor thing, now lie down and let me try out this new massage technique” kind of way. The emergent Brit actress is famed for playing vulnerable—so much so that it’s only a matter of time before documentary-makers get their way, and cast her as Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Riz MC must have seen her in Accused, or Venus, or the Critters-tastic Attack the Block, because he’s booked for his latest video, having first told her to part her lips a little more and push her vulnerable side through the roof. “All of You” is classic battle of the sexes territory, where the shopworn formula gets a kick in the arse thanks to Riz’s acidic confessions (and the fact that he’s cast himself as a lube-abusing love rat). It takes place at night, of course, somewhere in south London, of course again, and features Riz kissing goodbye to his latest Mrs MC, drinking in her softness now that he’s pierced and conquered her. It’s the song’s theme—love as one-upmanship, the rush of knowing you’ve made someone weaker—and so it’s fitting that he gives his girl a mixtape and an Alba CP300 cassette player to enjoy it on, packing her off on the Docklands Light Railway.

What unfolds is creepy, like that part in Batman Begins where Katie Holmes has to taser Bale in the tit. The sense of menace calmly escalates thanks to the nightvision bass and beats, and as Jodie zones out on the train, Riz’s voice starts to purr through her earphones: “Maybe I can be that nice, clean dream for you / Be the first to get a taste of your creamy truth / It’s an ego thing, I want to lock you down / ‘Cos you’re infinitely intricate like London town…” Suddenly it’s her stop, and she’s off and panicked and in an underpass. And just like with the Smiths, it’s dark and there’s someone with her, but she can’t see this one as he purrs more smuttily about the absurdity of him and her as a couple, and the weird shit he keeps in his bedside pedestal. “You can’t have all of me / But give me all of you,” coos Riz while shadowing her in a pea coat, flashing through his favourite topless memories, menaced by his guilt. Let that be a lesson to you young man, and warn you of what happens when you become one of those deviants who get their rushes from breaking people’s hearts.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Riz Mc

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Though I was plenty fond of that fanmade, Godard-copping video already, there’s no denying that the official music video for “Vanessa,” lead single from the forthcoming Grimes/D’eon 12” split and quite possibly the strongest track she’s put her name to thus far, takes the task of visualizing the distinctive Grimes aesthetic to a whole other level. Not that I’m really surprised: here Claire Boucher herself assumes directorial responsibilities, applying the characteristically personal and ardently DIY approach to film that we’ve come to expect from all aspects of her music. The result is a video that is simultaneously accessible and weird, gorgeous and creepy, conventional and subversive—in short, it’s exactly like the music it accompanies.

In much the same way that in a Grimes album one hears trace elements of mainstream pop music stirring just beneath weirder surfaces, snatches of pure convention which come into focus briefly before being subsumed again by the surrounding abstraction, “Vanessa” often flirts with the standard practices of pop music videos, always to great effect. Boucher’s endearing dance moves provide the perfect counterpoint to the almost Silent Hill-like stuff with which she’s cross-cut. At times this foray into pop-art spectacle borders on music video territory already well-worn by Lady Gaga, but any parallels to that end only serve to underscore the difference, in quality as well as type, between pop stars pretending to be weird and genuinely weird artists pretending to be—and thereby subverting, undermining, being critical of—pop stars. I’ll side with the latter every time.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Grimes

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Since we all recognize the principal function of a music video to be the translation of sounds into appropriate images, directors have gotten significant mileage out of deliberately doing the opposite. Pairing a song’s aesthetic with its visual inversion—a slasher-themed clip for a pop song, for instance—is, like most music video “angles,” a pretty superficial gimmick. Pairing conflicting visual and aural styles doesn’t surprise or confound us like it’s intended to because the trick itself seems so obvious. But Exploding Motor Car’s new production, which takes as its subject (albeit somewhat loosely) AIDS Wolf’s “Catholic for Rent,” approaches that same basic concept in such a genuinely new and refreshing way that it seems frankly incredible that nobody’s thought of this exact execution before.

Their spin on the premise is simple: a small production crew arrives at AIDS Wolf’s studio to film a cliched music video in which fog machines and strobe lights make it nearly impossible for the band to perform, all of which—the video itself and its in-progress development—is presented to us, for several minutes at least, in a pretty typical mockumentary style. But the mid-video “twist,” in which the video production is interrupted by the band suddenly defecating uncontrollably before being literally attacked by the very shit which results, is, silly as it may sound, actually kind of revelatory. Here’s a band with a uniquely defined, resolutely anti-commercial sound, attempting to produce a standard rock-style music video—a medium for which their brand of extremely abrasive no-wave couldn’t be less appropriately suited—suddenly halting the process, restoring their pride in repulsion, and delving straight into outright shit. Here’s a band for whom the very idea of the music video is fundamentally at odds with the philosophy of their work, so what better way both to subvert our expectations of the format and, amusingly enough, to create an appropriate visual analog to accompany their music than to dismantle the video by confronting us with aggressive, renegade turds? The “fake” spot being developed in the opening of the video, the straight-forwardly dark project built around the ‘in-your-face’ veneer provided by a fog machine and a strobe light, is, like the punk rock building blocks “Catholic for Rent” shreds through, presented only as an outmoded template for the band to deconstruct. AIDS Wolf don’t simply darken established conventions, they attempt to subvert and undermine them entirely. Fitting, then, that their music video should reflect exactly that tendency.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Aids Wolf

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It was a Season 9 finale where America finally found its quintessential Idol, a.k.a. a dude who sings every song like some drunk guy stumbling out of a bar, and where Janet Jackson performed two whole songs strictly from her dimples. For making me nearly forget about these bad, bad things, I can only offer Christina Aguilera my deepest thanks. Really, who would think that in such a context Aguilera would deliver one of the best live TV song performances of, maybe, all time, tearing with incredible passion and skill through a song from her upcoming and now-hotly-anticipated-by-me Bionic. And props to Idol for the uncharacteristically elegant and evocative staging, but seriously, what just happened? I mean that in a very good way; I’m about to go Kara DioGuardi on this—shoulders hunched, head bobbing side to side, finger pointed in the air as I declare Aguilera’s vocal “genius” and “amazing,” etc.

Even to someone well-aware of Aguilera’s technical prowess as a singer this performance could be considered astonishing, the exaggerated quaver runs in the bridge just one example of her obscenely great voice control. She uses this power for good, too, culling nuanced vocal feats out of the poignant if obvious central piano line and somehow constantly managing to take the melody to unexpected sweet spots where few other pop singers could follow. So “You Lost Me” functions as Aguilera’s neo-aria, monumental like opera except, you know, heart-rendingly relevant. For beyond all the rapturous details and dazzling virtuosity it’s the grand emotional arc of Aguilera’s voice and the performance as a whole that soars and soars and—given the song’s themes of loss, neglect, infidelity, and an “infected” world—soars right into an infinite pit, a pitch-black sky. Against such a dark backdrop, though, Aguilera positively gleams, radiant, a singular star shooting upward. Lee DeWho?

⊙ Keyword Tags: American Idol, Christina Aguilera

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Some immediate and unresolved reactions upon an initial viewing and subsequent re-viewing of M.I.A.’s “Born Free” video, which was introduced this week along with a host of other material designed to promote her forthcoming album:

1. It is entirely valid to ask Americans (because, given the patches on the video’s antagonists’ shoulders, they are obviously the intended audience, and not because they should be held more responsible for thinking about or responding to genocide than, say, a Canadian like me) to consider what it would be like if those in positions of authority in their country targeted and executed a subset of the population on the basis of an arbitrary genetic factor. This is happening in the world, and to the degree portrayed in M.I.A.’s video. I will stop here to keep from seeming as if I am lecturing or assuming a position of some knowledgeable, principled superiority, though I will append an encouragement to Google “Sri Lankan Civil War 2009.”

2. It is also entirely valid to suggest that the situation detailed in the video does not display much of the dense, befuddling, and longstanding complexities that contribute to the escalation of a situation into genocide. Though clearly genocide is so unjustifiable as to render this very sentence redundant and simply me covering my ass, the imprecision of the narrative here seems designed to abstain from speaking to any specific situation, and so the viewer is left with the uncontested point that genocide is horrific and unjustifiable. The problem being that those perpetrators of genocide are almost never of the belief that they are perpetrating genocide for unjustifiable reasons, but are rather hopelessly deluded or brainwashed into believing that they are doing something if not good then necessary, or are forced by economic and social means and fear to pursue the agenda of other, more powerful agents. Though this video is clearly not aimed at perpetrators of genocide, but at the American mainstream audience, one assumes with the hope that they will more clearly understand and become sensitive to certain realities, it is unclear who, upon viewing this video, will understand or agree more with its underlying contention than they did before, and if they did what they would then feel empowered to do about it. This video then seems to differ only in degree to the PC epithet that to raise awareness, or to become more aware, is roughly equivalent to political action, not unlike America’s Next Top Model calling attention to the intensely complex problem of homelessness via a sexy photo shoot.

3. Question: does the video imply that its audience does not have a position on or sufficient understanding of racism and/or genocide, and, if so, is this infantalization of the audience warranted by the continued criminal occurrence of genocide?

4. Also: is it cynical to suggest that because this video was instantly framed as shocking and controversial even before most viewers had a chance to view and so be shocked by it and raise the discussion attendant to controversy, that its shock and controversy is perforce by commercial strategy? If this is in fact the case, is it okay for a video with a message that is clearly moral in nature to manufacture a sense of its own subversiveness in order to convey said message?

5. The Vice Magazine website currently features a flash animation that elaborates upon the central sequence of the video during which a child is exploded by a landmine. The animation replays the explosion while giving the effect that the gory remains of the child are then hurled at the screen, where they splat and begin to run and eventually spell out the letters “M.I.A.”.This direct conflation of the substance of the video’s message and the promotion materials used to sell M.I.A.’s forthcoming album—and thus the ongoing and direct conflation of politics with M.I.A.’s brand—is simultaneously and intentionally upsetting and thoroughly modern, a neo-commercial platform that shivers with and is inextricably tied to a mimetic resonance and the underlying principle that to venture ever further into the void of darker imaginations is only natural.

6. The above ideas about commercialism were presciently pioneered with as much visceral moral conflict but a greater degree of self-awareness in J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash.

7. Speaking of self-awareness, how shocking and controversial is a video whose essential narrative thrust is the gory execution of children but whose violence is no sicker than at least two of the scenes from the mostly playful and self-aware movie Kick-Ass, one in which a man is exploded in an industrial microwave, and another wherein a man is crushed to death with a pulpy and nauseating pop in a car compactor while he screams for his life? How indicative is the violence employed in this video of the anachronism of the shock tactic? Are we, cognitively and creatively, as post-violence as we are post-modern? Is the authenticity with which we allow violence to touch us as easily called into question as the authenticity with which we consume product meant to evoke any strong emotion?

⊙ Keyword Tags: M.i.a.

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I would like to now shift the discussion to the new Lady Gaga video, which is too insane for me to even talk about in terms of good or bad. I actually feel sort of disoriented/inspired to write 25,000 words about everything and nothing.

People, help me parse this. Possible discussions:

1) What do we think about how this is the second video—out of, what, three or four?—to feature poisoning and assassination?

2) Does Gaga’s portrayal of her bisexuality = Tatu, and if not, why?

3) Are there any further Tarantino references beyond the Pussy Wagon that I’m not seeing? Was the Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill itself a reference to something else? If so, what?

4) How does a ten minute video with this many ideas in it still have such obvious and clumsy product placement?

5) What is Beyonce doing here? As a person without an apparent self-awareness (think of “If I Was a Boy” as the sincere counter-argument to this Gaga video), is her participation here acquiescence to the kind of pop reflexivity that Gaga represents? Or: does Gaga represent a sort of anti-sincerity and, if so, what does Beyonce—as sort of ultimate in R&B/pop emoting—do to her image by appearing here? Am I being unfair to both artists?

6) If Joanna Newsom appeared in that video, would Nitsuh Abebe’s head have exploded?

⊙ Keyword Tags: Beyonce, Lady Gaga, What In The Living Fuck

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