This is simply fantastic. I love this song, and The Knife have so many good tunes that it’s impossible not to like them. The way these visuals take each element of the song and animate it repeatedly reminds me of Michel Gondry’s take on Chemical Brothers’ Star Guitar, which used aspects of the French countryside to represent each instrument or melody within the song.
When done correctly, like this one is, it looks amazing and adds another layer to the song as you can see when certain instruments come in and drop out at different points. Fantastic stuff.
It’s not often that I get a real hankering to listen to one album in particular, but for some reason today I had Tool’s Lateralus album in my head. I put it on when I got home, and remembered just how good it is. It’s a fantastic collection of songs, and I remember how much I loved it when I first bought the CD.
It also brought back memories of actually buying the CD itself, because it was one of those artfully packaged jobs. The booklet was made of transparent plastic, with each page turn revealing a little more of the stylised human head dissection. It was a cool CD.
Equally stunning were the videos made for each song. They were a mix of puppetry, stop-animation, and performance art, and were pretty freaky indeed. Someone has taken the time to rip them from a DVD in HD and put them up on Youtube, which means we can get weirded out all over again now.
What an absolutely classic early 90s dance tune. You might remember that Simply Red sampled the percussion for their song Fairground, ruining it.
This evening, I’ve been going through the tracklistings for the Now That’s What I Call Music series of compilation albums, remembering some of my favourite tunes from the early and mid 90s, which was when I first got into music. You can find this song on Now 26, which also included Apache Indian, Haddaway, Culture Beat, and loads more.
You might remember Pogo from that Alice in Wonderland mash-up song a little while back. He’s still making music, mostly from Disney films, but I absolutely loved this track that he’s made from real world sounds.
It’s strangely enchanting, and even with the distorted vocal you can hear his mother’s Australian accent. Amazing stuff.
Remember when Victoria Beckham tried to have a solo pop career? Yeah, I think we can safely say that was a mistake. Her voice is just awful, even with all of the editing in post-production.
Oh man, I’m such a huge fan of Spike Jonze. I keep meaning to buy the DVD with loads of his best music videos on, as well as Michel Gondry’s. He did some fantastic videos in the 90s, most of which are above, but there’s a few notable exceptions:
The Pharcyde - Drop, filmed completely in reverse, and featuring a little cameo from the Beastie Boys, who were sampled in the track.
Daft Punk - Da Funk, following a half-man, half-dog through a lonely evening in New York. Brilliant.
Fatboy Slim - Praise You, a spoof documentary of a local dance group performing to this track outside a cinema in Los Angeles.
Ludacris - Get Back, a real satire on usual gangsta rap videos.
The man’s a genius, essentially. He’s a damn good actor too, as evidenced by his part in Three Kings, a criminally underrated film.
I’ve been listening to Roni Size a lot this week, for some unknown reason. It’s a mix of drum’n’bass and trip hop that I was really into in the late 90s, and I’m drifting back towards as a result of listening to so much DJ Shadow and the like.
I was going to post the track Brown Paper Bag by itself, but realised that it’s a 9-minute epic and wouldn’t work. Then I remembered that the video for it was a fantastic piece of art by itself. Remember, this was pre-Matrix, and not a lot of videos employed such sophisticated techniques.
Yesterday’s PopBitch email had a section which harked back to 1992, as part of their series of remembering the 90s. Amongst some random gossip, including which celebs turned 16 that year, they had a little list of some classic tunes that came out that year.
I remember 1992 as the year I really started listening to music. We moved back from Germany in the middle of 1991, and then moved house again, but in 1992 I started watching Top Of The Pops more often, and listening to the radio in my mum’s car. It was pop music at first, but even then I leaned to the more dancy side of things. Nearly 20 years later, I still love loads of the songs from that year, and PopBitch brought back some great memories.
The best of their selection was the above, Ace of Base - All That She Wants, but there were some other great tunes too:
Londoner, thinking and writing far too much about far too many random things. Wannabe photo-/videographer of my life. More likely to be found propping up a bar somewhere.
