Top 5 Music Videos of the Week: Gorillaz, Phantom + more
Put in your earbuds and tune out the bad old world for a while. It’s time for the best music videos of the week!
5. Phantom — “Dance”
One of the things I would most like to do with my life is curate a video gallery showing of modern solo dance performances in music videos. There’s just something so wonderfully evocative about putting all your song’s emotion into the body of a single person. Director Teemu Antero 1983 shoots dancer Karolina Ginman with remarkable grace, and it really makes “Dance” something dark and special.
4. Lexie Roth — “Drive”
This one is a little sadder, but all the more powerful for it. “Drive,” directed by Liv Prior Colliander, is the story of Roth leaving an abusive relationship by stealing a car and just heading on out to the end of the world. It’s a simple video, but it’s got some amazingly clever shots. My favorite is Roth in a bathroom smiling happily to herself in a mirror while a stall with a handwritten sign saying “BROKEN” is in the corner of the frame. It’s a triumphant video, crafted with both pathos and beauty.
3. French Vanilla — “Carrie”
So, there’s this famous musical version of Stephen King’s Carrie that flopped so hard on Broadway the phrase, “Not since Carrie” actually became a proverb. Well, I have finally seen the true version of Carrie the Musical, and it is this lovely video by director William Kaminski. The whole tale is told in three blistering, cheesy, and outstanding minutes, and features everything from kitschy dance numbers to screaming about menstruation. It even has Rocky Horror lips narrating it, so it’s basically perfect.
2. Spiral Stairs — “Emoshuns”
Look, videos where bands just go take over whatever place is open and fuck around there to make a video are fun, but usually just lazy. “Director Joe Salinas manages to transcend that with “Emoshuns” though. Part of it is the strange, clippy framerate at which the video is shot, giving it an odd-dreamlike quality that keeps it interesting. Part of it is also because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a band have quite this much fun before. In a sub-genre of music videos that is generally uninteresting, “Emoshuns” stands out.
1. Gorillaz — “Saturz Barz (Spirit House)”
It feels weird to even try to describe a Gorillaz video as the band remains more or less their own genre in and of themselves. Best I can lay it out for you is the gang goes to a haunted house, and a bunch of Gorillaz stuff happens. It’s awesome, excellent, trippy, engaging, it’s got full-frontal male nudity and if you don’t like it I don’t want to know you. Everything Gorillaz does is soul.
