Deptford Goth's LP Life After Defo, one of the most stunning and immaculate debuts I've come across in a long long time, is finally out today via Merok Records. Back in December, we posted the video for the single "Union", and today, Dazed & Confused unveiled the video for one of the absolute album standouts, the achingly beautiful "Feel Real", stylistically done in a similar fashion as last year's predecessor. Watch it below, and get Life After Defo now over here. Needless to add, highly recommended.
Opale is the Paris-based duo of Madrid native Rocío Ortiz and French artist Sophia Hamadi, whose 2012 debut EP as Playground turned quite a few heads with its eerie, transcendent synth soundscapes somewhere between 80s cold wave tropes and latter day, drone-informed ambient psychedelia. The follow-on project taps into the same undercurrents, again relying on reduced, clinical wave bass lines and glacial synth incursions. Below, watch the Elise Tippins-made video for "Les Champs Magnétiques", the first track off Opale's forthcoming LP L'Incandescent, which will be out in May via Stellar Kinematics and Heia Sun.
Yes. We do know it's Monday already. Still, here's our latest selection of delicious videos, and as Video Sunday has been on a brief hiatus, we present our favourite works of the past few weeks, including those fabulous new pieces for Ducktails and Vondelpark, plus some excellent contributions by Ensemble Economique, Test House, and new NFOP favourites Millennium. Enjoy.
Millenium - Q&A (directed by Millennium & Adrian Parvulescu)
Vondelpark - California Analog Dream (directed by Rollo Jackson)
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Ensemble Economique - Something New Is Happening (images by Norman McLaren)
The eye test Justin Timberlake is so fond of these days (see The 20/20 Experience) rears its head in the premiere video for boys of Brooklyn VISUALS’ (Marshall Ryan and Andrew Fox, the latter probably still known to some as part of probably defunct BK outfit Translations) "Levitation", in which an eye test conjures projections of highlighter and maybe outer space. The eye test doesn’t just function as a cool music video angle. Fox possessed only 'partial vision' and had to be trained in how to see in all-encompassing 3D. So as you can imagine, everything about the band, its name and music video conceit, mean more with this story – he was in the position of the little girl quite a bit. Announcements about a debut EP haven’t been made yet, but another track is up on their Soundcloud.
This video for the collaboration between UK producer Hervé and currently Lisbon-based Maria Minerva is a perfect match for a couple of reasons. First of all, the unusually soft Hervé production on "Gold" really lends itself to Minerva’s in-the-clouds vocal style. Secondly, the Tim Kelly-directed video goes well with Minerva’s lyrical content: The video begins with her face projected above mundane images of cities and roads; travel, as her voice echoes out lyrics about a dream of the future in which her problems are in the past and everything is golden. As the video progresses, the images of travelled cityscapes are almost entirely replaced by the new focus on Minerva’s face. It’s as if all the dreaming and travelling are reaching an end, and that dream of a golden future is now a reality.
Check out the video for “Gold” below and buy the entire album, The Art of Disappearing, from Hervé’s label, Cheap Thrills.
Frankly, the concept of an International Women's Day rubs me wrong. It feels counterintuitive. The fact that it shares calendar space with the International R. Kelly day makes it even weirder. But since I love both women and sex-dripping R&B classics from the 90s, especially when put together in interesting ways in my head, I won't complain further. This afternoon, I woke up to a beautiful vision in The Knife's new music video for the second single "A Tooth From An Eye" off their forthcoming fifth album Shaking The Habitual. Directors Roxy Farhat and Kakan Hermansson subvert age-, power- and gender roles as a girl child enters a sports hall and starts leading a group of men into dance. Following her movements, the disparate and for the most part inexperienced troupe is freed from prestige and fear of intimacy, transcending the hierarchal machismo space of a sports arena. The cornrowed girl, both sweet and tough, is roaring for us to trust her. She's telling us stories we need to hear. 'Who are the people we trust as leaders and why?', The Knife ask. As always their work performs as an allegory for wider, complex societal structures, overall continuously tackling the patriarchy. The lights get dimmer in the sports hall, providing shadow for dead serious tribal play. At some point sparklers are ignited. The whole thing is crackling with magic. Notice how it's making them all shine.
If it weren't for pop music, you would probably think that within Europe, there could hardly be two places more apart from each other, in any respect whatsoever, than the Scandinavian and the Iberian peninsulas. But of course, as we all know, pop music very much is (please bear with me), so mentally connecting those two geographically disparate entities makes perfect sense, especially if you equate Scandinavia with Sweden (sorry, you other ones). Enter Iberia aka Gothenburg's Maja Mathé Milner (of Makthaverskan) and Alexander Palmestål (of now defunct Pistol Disco), who are actually located not in Gothenburg anymore but here in Berlin, which only further proves that Sweden is less a country than a state of mind; just like the Mediterranean (undecided as regards the German capital). What was I talking about? Oh right, Iberia. "Everyday" is the duo's brand new single, unveiled here today by way of this incredibly appropriate video. The song itself is picture-perfect Swedish pop, which means that it is instantly captivating and clearly made to live out there in the spotlight, yet entailing those delicately twisted edges that always manage to leave you slightly unsettled and anxious.
Speaking of states of mind, the video's 'protagonists' clearly have none, but that doesn't really matter in the end; it is actually creepy how perfectly the blatantly alien, deliberately un-hipsterish characters match with Iberia's thrusting, restless and subtly unnerving track. Add to all the above pan-European glory the fact that the video was shot by Rasmus Svensson at the latest Thunderdome festival in Amsterdam last December, and you really got just about every stereotypical continental rave hotspot gathered in a single instance of pop-cultural manifestation. If that ain't meta, I really don't know what is. Hardcore indeed.
Iberia's single Everyday will be out soon via Hybris, with the as yet unnamed debut full-length set to follow later this year.
Last month, Brighton's Fear of Men released a compilation of early songs and singles, which initially might seem like a rather odd move for such a young band (wasn't this something you were doing when you had run out of ideas but still needed money?), but first, this is the internet age, so more than ever before does an artist's early work inevitably drip out of the depths of the web at some point, so why not turn it into cash while you can, and second, with this outfit in particular it totally makes sense as the quartet has already produced and published such a wealth of quality material that the result does feel like a proper album anyway. Plus this lot very much remains our favourite guitar band du jour, so they could basically sell us anything. Below, watch the brand new video for the wonderful and previously unreleased "Seer".
Fear of Men's Early Fragments single collection is out via Kanine.
