A child cult, dusty oscilloscopes, and an extremely lecherous dinosaur puppet all make an appearance in our roundup of the best music videos of the past week, all of which have absolutely nothing to do with the actual musical or lyrical content of their videos. Still, if Mew want to disappear into some spinning dream machine, The Black Heart Procession want to be pursued by massive rats with red glowing eyes, and the Black Keys want to throw a pool party populated by prehistorics, then who are we to argue with artistic intent?
Holy Fuck – “Latin America”
Reversed, splash-happy images of divers and jittery sped-up images of Holy Fuck on tour accompany the wordless amphetamine moans of “Latin America.” Frisbees take on flying saucer dimensions, and the band eventually is chopped into triangular fragments that devolve into washed-out images of their live show. Beeping morse code stutters fade in and out, the clip ending in images of churning water and triumphant diving board leaps.
The Black Heart Procession – “Rats”
The video is an extended hallucination, a haunted man roaming through animated streets while facing increasing natural threats. Among the blood red streets are squawking bats and a massive fist that rises out of the ground to release balls of fire. Rats are the especially important aggressors, scurrying all about with evil glowing eyes, devouring a body as it bleeds blue, and increasing to enormous size to chase after the haunted man in the middle of a rose rainstorm. Lyrics like “I can’t sleep tonight/and I can’t stay alive” are too fitting for facing that kind of vermin opposition.
Mew – “Beach”
A pantsless young boy intently examines a gaggle of other pantsless pre-adolescents, ominously chanting with cultish fervor around a flickering lightbulb and a spinning dream machine. An unknown force circles outside, but the kids ostensibly escape just in time into the thematically impenetrable world of Mew. It’s the kind of place where humans and mountains alike cry black and white tears and a disembodied head sings nonchalantly in a grass field. It’s a dark video, and the Jonesboro implications at the ending are unnervingly unresolved.
Born Ruffians – “What To Say”
A junkyard of old technology zooms in on a disorienting oscilloscope, which animates every single image used in the video from a single, murky horizontal line. The process looks time-consuming, to say the least, especially when looking at the detailed depictions of the band jamming. The entire thing seems like a cross between a dusty old video game and gee-whiz modern images.
The Black Keys – “Next Girl”
There are numerous bikini-clad women lounging by a pool, while a roving dinosaur puppet gawks and lip-synchs to the Southern scuzz rock and generally attempts to be the life of the party. The great part about the video is the meta quality of the scrolling ticker feed at the bottom, constantly distracting you with its claims that the Black Keys absolutely despise the video and think that a lip-synching dinosaur is terrible and unfunny. Whether they actually dislike it or the feed is just some meta commentary on their growing commercial prospects is your own guess.