9.16.14: The Last VJ’s Top 5 Music Videos of the Week
Welcome to The Last VJ, music fans! This week I went with pretty. Just pretty little music videos like Bob Ross paintings. There’s beautiful impressionist stuff, the abstract, the pop art, and even a little gritty urban landscaping if you’re into that sort of thing. It’s one of those weeks that shows off just how well what pleases the eye mixes with what pleases the ear. Pop them peepers, and let’s go.
Octave Minds, “Anthem”
Octave Minds, the collaboration between Boys Noize & Chilly Gonzales, has become a consistent source for mind-bendingly brilliant and beautiful music videos. It was only a month ago that they showed off “Symmetry Slice”, and that was fine and all, but “Anthem” is magic.
Director Rolf Bremer takes us through a highly stylized adventure with an intrepid woman explorer who seeks the peak of a mountain just to jump off of it. It’s like a living slice of 19th century pulp fiction, a breathing tale of an Edwardian adventuress. The concept is simple, but it’s masterfully done and presents the wordless song like a daring short film.
Dee Sada, “Bells and Ships and Songs”
Normally I have this thing against music videos with no narrative. Boring performance-based vids are the worst, but completely random image dumps are a close second. Dee Sada’s “Bells and Ships and Songs” is an exception to the latter.
It’s little more of an exhibition of running yellow paints, which is a little boring, true, but unlike most videos of this type it’s so artfully tied into the progression of the song that it inspires a hypnotic state. You really can just lose yourself in the bright and the black of the image.
