January 2014

Intertwine "So What" (Johanne Helgeland, dir.)

Norway’s Intertwine reveal their new video for “So What”, presenting director Johanne Helgeland’s profound visual portrait of growing up. It’s a piercing and engaging journey symbolised by a young boy wandering through woodland.

Vice (empty bottles), sloth (an old couch), death (broken egg, dead bird), and even a touch of lust (mysterious woman’s dress found in a lake) rear their heads amongst the images. All of this, of course, would be an unflatteringly heady affair were it not for the equally thematic ambitions of the track itself.

Disclosure f/ Mary J. Blige "F For You" (Kate Moross, dir.)

How distinctive and effective are the white line tracings that Disclouse have used on their album art, promo photos and nearly everywhere else? So much that they made an app where you can make and share your own. 

That style carries over to this collabo clip with the one and only Mary J. Blige, splitting the difference between performance piece, lyric video and animation.

Bruce Springsteen "Just Like Fire Would" (Thom Zimny, dir.)

Despite having a music video with a moment so famous and impactful that you could essentially use it as a definition for what an '80s video looked like — see: Courtney Cox + Dancing In The Dark — Bruce Springsteen has never been a comfortable participant in our world. In fact, he's essentially shifted to purely performance or otherwise modest videos since his 1999 E-Street Band Reunion. "Just Like Fire Would" continues that trend, featuring nothing but a staged performance with his band and special guest Tom Morello of this 1986 single by Australian alternative band The Saints.

Bruce has always worked with great filmmakers — Brian DePalma directed "Dancing In The Dark," Jonathan Demme, Meiert Avis and Mark Pellington have all been recurrent video collaborators, and his post-reunion video guru is Thom Zimny, who edited the classic HBO show The Wire and directed some amazing longform pieces about Bruce and the band — but hopefully the time will come soon when he'll let one of these directors, or someone of their caliber, deliver the kind of narrative or imagistic videos that could add another level of interpretation to the music and reach beyond the base.

That said: The Boss can do whatever he wants.

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