Tag Archives: video

FAVORITE SONGS OF 2008: SANTOGOLD — “LIGHTS OUT”

It’s easy to under­stand why San­ti White aka San­to­gold would be upset with crit­ics for call­ing her music hip-hop or R&B, as any­one who’s lis­tened to her lat­est sin­gle, “Lights Out,” would know. It’s a great new wave track that could’ve, nay, should’ve been one of the sum­mer’s under­sung hits. Then again, with a new sea­son of “Gos­sip Girl” just around the cor­ner, it might have the mak­ings of a cam­pus classic.

FAVORITE SONGS OF 2008: PORTISHEAD — “THE RIP”

Por­tishead­’s “The Rip” is hands down one of my favorite songs of 2008. The video is equal­ly beau­ti­ful. It’s on my cur­rent mix and I’m guess­ing it’ll stay there for the rest of the year. I did­n’t think that Por­tishead­’s Third could match their ear­li­er work; Dum­my had a major impact on me as a teenag­er try­ing to wean him­self off of crunch­ing gui­tars, and the melan­choly expressed in their music floored me.

Third is the sort of album that shows a band capa­ble of regain­ing their for­mer glo­ry. The emo­tion­al heft of “The Rip” real­ly demon­strates that Por­tishead still have a grasp on what made them so great to begin with. R.E.M. and Metal­li­ca could learn a thing or two from them.

I’m also fond of Radio­head­’s back­stage ver­sion, fea­tured above, with Thom Yorke and Jon­ny Green­wood both on acoustic gui­tars. It’s so ref­er­en­tial and love­ly; Yorke’s voice is a thing of won­der with mate­r­i­al like this.

FAVORITE BAND OF THE MOMENT: CUT COPY

It took me a lit­tle while to warm up to Aus­trali­a’s Cut Copy, a band I first saw at the Rhap­sody Rocks par­ty at SXSW. Now I’ve fall­en in love with their lat­est album, In Ghost Colours. It’s got the glitchy bril­liance that I loved about Beta Band, with some of the splashy synths that made me swoon for Depeche Mode as a kid. Dan Whit­ford’s vocals cer­tain­ly war­rant that com­par­i­son, espe­cial­ly on their first sin­gle, “Lights and Music.”

Watch them per­form “Lights and Music” in this video from Pitch­fork TV.

New Black Mountain Video — “Wucan”

Black Moun­tain prob­a­bly just employed the most tired con­cept for their lat­est video, “Wucan,” but I’m sure plen­ty of herbs will go absolute­ly bonkers for it.  As I watched this video I could­n’t help but wish they’d fleshed out the Krautrock from their last album instead of pur­su­ing this Easy Rid­er non­sense. [via Fork­cast]Con­tin­ue read­ing “New Black Moun­tain Video — “Wucan””