The Black Belles are the latest band to be signed to Jack White’s Third Man Records, and with a back catalogue as sprawlingly strong as his, you won’t be surprised to hear they sound pretty good. Directed by Mr.White himself, Shelby, Olivia, Ruby and Erin look as monochrome as anticipated and resonate the necessary amount of electricity. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more from them in the not too distant future.
“But I don’t WANT one music video!” I can imagine a sulky Jack exclaiming as he brought his fists down upon the mixing desk, “I want THREE!” Or perhaps he was just looking to bring a more varied viewing experience to his dedicated fans with the visual accompaniment to new track The Black Bat Licorice. Either way, the interactive video he finally came up with, which offers three full music videos simultaneously, is more than enough to keep us satisfied.
Good lord, I haven’t OMGd this hard since…possibly since anything this big and Blur-related happened last time, maybe with the release of Under the Westway, maybe when I sweatily, heart-in-mouthedly (be cool Gosling!) met Damon Albarn in a Foyles book shop. As anyone who’s been on any form of social media in the last hour will know, during a lovely long live Facebook chat with Zane Lowe this morning it was announced that Blur have recorded a new album, called The Magic Whip (their first full-length release in 12 years) revealing the very cool artwork in The Sun of all places this morning.
How exactly do you go about measuring the success of a band like One Direction, who have been the source of underwear-throwing and diary-doodling since they came upon success in The X Factor in 2010? They’ve got a cool 22 million Twitter followers for starters, which goes some way to demonstrating the enormity of the job Studio Moross had on its hands when it started art directing their tour last Autumn.
In another brilliant feat of creative engineering that bridges the gap between music, art and design, a project at the White Cube gallery in London’s Bermondsey sees musicians including Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore perform a composition for Christian Marclay, which is recorded and pressed on site by The Vinyl Factory Press. The press is housed in a shipping container, and the artwork for the record – also created on site – is designed by Christian and printed by Coriander Press, in a series that feels like cottage industry, DIY ideas brought into a slick, art-world setting.
Maybe it’s because I spent all day Saturday watching Beatles documentaries, or maybe it’s because I’m feeling emotional and loving after a big lunch, but this is great. If you had told anyone five years ago that Rihanna, Kanye and Paul would team up with fashion photography powerhouse Inez and Vinoodh to create a music video, no one would have believed you. But, it’s happened. Sure Brandon Stosuy from Pitchfork just referred to it on Twitter as a GAP commercial, but I think maybe it’s stronger than that. When the collaboration was first announced I expected them to accompany it with a mindbendingly expensive blockbuster video à la Justin Timberlake’s What Goes Around…Comes Around complete with a car chase. But no, it’s stripped back, fashionable, kinda soppy and watchable. Well done Inez and Vinoodh, you’ve made this almost farcical musical trio somewhat more believable.
While we wait to take our turn to become a sort of strangely sanctioned voyeur as PJ Harvey records her ninth album, thinking about what’s ahead feels peculiar. Essentially, we’re going to see PJ (Polly Jean) Harvey, her band, producers Flood and John Parish, a photographer and two engineers making an album in a Something & Son-designed box, formed of glass that allows visitors to see in, while the musicians can’t see out.
The more we see of FKA Twigs, the more it becomes apparent that there’s no end to what she can do. She has a voice like nothing we’ve ever heard before, she dances like an extra-terrestrial placed on this earth solely to do so, and she directs all of her own music videos, because her creative vision for the visuals which accompany her music is such that nobody else could quite nail it. So the word talented doesn’t really cover it.
There are so few artists that manage to move into the higher echelons of householdnamery and still feel totally, grimily relevent to us every day. Despite David Shrigley’s 2012 Hayward Retrospective, his massive thumbs up set to grace Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth in 2016, and numerous other brilliant projects behind him, his work still feels so prescient and so hilariously real that we’re still extremely excited by each and every project his camp announces. So when we were told about the new spoken word album he’s involved in, Music and Words, we were naturally intrigued.
I think I’m safe in saying that fans of Panda Bear, the pseudonym of Noah Lennox of Animal Collective, are probably pretty into video games. I’m also sure that those who are into video games (myself included) are also fans of the good vs. evil storyline prevalent in most games and a lot of films that resemble games, Studio Ghibli etc. There is pure beauty in the little guy overcoming the big baddie, or the idea of friends working together to solve a puzzle, or to override some kind of evil power.
Some video directors like to head straight to the lyrics of a song for inspiration. The lyrics of Tom Rosenthal’s song Watermelon are as follows: “It’s watermelon time, I said boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. It’s watermelon time, I said boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. It’s watermelon time, I said boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. It’s watermelon time, I said boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. It’s a fruit based love.” It only seems fitting then that the video accompaniment to this tune is footage of a man in an extremely well-crafted watermelon suit, bounding around the British countryside willy-nilly. Hats off to Sidd Khajuria, Ben Elwyn, Nathan Jones, and Tom Rosenthal himself for keeping things simple, with fantastic results.
It’s pretty rare that I give two hoots about dubstep/trap/beats as a musical genre – my dancing sucks and I’m never anything but awkward in a club. But – and this is a big but – stick some slamming bass over sci-fi visuals and I can’t get enough of that stuff. Daniel Swan and David Rudnick’s latest collaboration is exactly that; a brutal mix of intense beats, wailing synth and some incredibly futuristic wartime visuals. There’s a swarm of stealth jets, laser-equipped helicopters and a seriously badass tank. It’s like being in the thick of the best computer game you’ve not yet had the chance to play. Nice!
I’m happy to admit that after watching all three minutes and 47 seconds of Stevie Gee’s new music video for Archie Bronson Outfit, my computer desktop is littered with so many screenshots of boobs, beers and motorbikes in psychedelic hues that I can scarcely find anything else. And the thing is I don’t even mind.
This is nuts. When you thought OK GO couldn’t do any better in one take than their last, famed effort then think again. The foursome are back with one of the most staggering efforts in the history of music videos, this time set in some sort of airport where the gang ride around on electronic unicycles popping umbrellas with about 1000 extras to form kaleidoscopic patterns when shot from above. The jaw dropping first few minutes is totally trumped in the last minute where the whole formation quadruples in size leaving you with your jaw resting on the desk in front of you. Unreal.
