The 5 Best Videos Of The Week
This week’s top clips tended toward the brighter, flipper side of things. Because summer, probably! But before we dive into the quirk and laughs, there’s a short filmic clip by a film director that is somewhat crushing. And then it’s all roses, dancing congregations, and bouncing asses for days. Step this way for a roundup of the week’s finest clips:
5. Unknown Mortal Orchestra – “From The Sun” (Dir. Rick Alverson)
Rick Alverson’s best known as the director of The Comedy, the 2012 Tim Heidecker film that didn’t always live up to its title. Here he brings ritual humiliation to the classroom, depicting a young man getting kissed and licked in the most degrading ways imaginable, as part of an unexplained hazing process that may as well be a metaphor for life. Am I right? Don’t worry, it all gets happier from here. But first, wallow please:
4. Mozart’s Sister – “Mozart’s Sister” (Dir. Angus Borsos)
Mozart’s Sister is Montreal’s Caila Thompson-Hannant, and in this self-titled track she’s like Montreal’s Lena Dunham: self-cast as the ho-hum, quirky also-ran to her backing singers’ appearance as more “conventionally attractive” ciphers. The clip plays it for smiles, and Caila seems self-aware and capable of sublimating her insecurities with identity and vanity into laughs and catchy art, so it’s a win for her and director Angus Borsos. One more Girls analogy: So many outfits.
3. TEEN – “Carolina” (Dir. Megha Barnabas)
This video’s director has worked once before with TEEN, on their last highly memorable video (for “Electric”), though “Carolina”‘s treatment is top-to-bottom the Megha Barnabas show: Flowers decorate her dress and bundle in her arms as she visits NYC’s symbolic sites and epicenters, offering blossoms to suits, coasting on “Carolina”‘s kraut-laced reverie until a climactic psychedelic freakout in Times Square, behind a sidewalk-strewn bouquet, in front of a backlit US flag. Honestly, the only thing that’s weird about it is that more people don’t have that reaction. There’s a lot symbolism happening here, though Megha’s movements are compelling enough that you don’t need to think if you don’t want to. Look, pretty flowers!
2. Disclosure – “When A Fire Starts To Burn” (Dir. Bo Mirosseni)
This is our eighth post on Disclosure this week, so you know something’s going right for them. Here, director Bo Mirosseni assembles an enviably diverse congregation in an imagined church where the preacher morphs into the song’s vocalist, and each congregant feels the holy spirit goofily enough to warrant playbacks to focus on each. So, watch it a few times! If Disclosure actually broke in the ’90s instead of just sounding like it, they’d tap Spike Jonze for this video and it’d look like this basically. (Also, their album Settle is great and you should listen to it right now.)
1. Major Lazer – “Bubble Butt” (Dir. Eric Wareheim)
Eric Wareheim’s third Major Lazer video is eye-popping and cheeky like his previous, insta-classic clips for “Pon De Floor” and “Keep it Goin’ Louder,” though in accordance with the source track’s title, the cheekiness is ratcheted up to heretofore unparalleled degrees. Azz everywhere on this one, which opens with three girls in a #seapunk lair Instagramming selfies meeting an intergalactic woman with butt-inflating powers. And as you can imagine, that’s when things get popping. Watch it below. Also, dear commenter Sam Nabors: looks like we’ll know you a bit longer yet.