Robyn – Page 100 – 5000 Ways to Love You

David Kilgour “Beached”

Halfway through watching the “Beached” video, I realised that this video would have looked so much better on a cathode ray television – the format it was created for.

“Beached” set in a dystopian future or maybe even another planet. D. Kilgour plays an alien or an astronaut who wanders around a beach, all along. He then ends up at a house, makes his way though a technological room, crawls through a pipe and is back on the beach.

It’s like an episode of “The Twilight Zone”, both plotwise and with production values. All that’s needed is for the lone adventurer to shocking be revealed as actually being a New Zealand indie star escaping from the pressing demands of promoting his new album by escaping into a fantasy world.

Best bit: the DIY astronaut headgear.

Director: Stuart Page
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… a world without girls.

Able Tasmans “The Big Bang Theory”

It’s full of stars. The Abel Tasmans get all metaphysical with a journey through space.

Explosions, chemical equations, planets, sun spots, a singing moon, constellations, rocky terrain and and the shadowy silhouette of a band that doesn’t want to be in their video. Or, you know, the awesome visuals speak for the music far more than a band performance would.

I’m stuck. It’s a “System Virtue” situation. The song sounds good, but I don’t know what the lyrics are so it doesn’t quite come together. I’m just going to literally assume it’s about astrophysics and enjoy its spacy graphics effects.

Best bit: the disembodied clapping hands.

Director: Ronald Young
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… beached as, bro.

Sisters Underground “In The Neighbourhood”

I just listened to this song for the first time in years and a lyric stood out:

It’s a cruel June morning on the edge of the city.
It’s so damn hot, and my neck is feeling gritty.

An unpleasantly hot day in June? This is not a New Zealand lyric. And I don’t think you’d find many “brothers talkin’ ’bout their damn MAC-10” around these parts.

It makes more sense to discover that Hassanah, Sisters Underground’s MC, is from Nigeria by way of New York, so I figure she’s allowed to write about her experience of stinking hot June days and guns in other cities in other hemispheres.

The “In The Neighbourhood” video is very cool, with footage of Hassanah and singer Brenda mooching around the streets of South Auckland wearing different combos of baggy jeans and buttoned-up shirts. Even though they both look like sweet teenage girls, they also have a toughness to them. Hey, they’re Sisters Underground. You do not mess with them.

And the video captures bits of ordinary South Auckland life. South Auckland has to be the most filmed area as far as music videos go. No videographers ever film people down at the Bucklands Beach shops.

This video rightly deserves its place as a landmark New Zealand music video. While it’s not the first music video to feature South Auckland life, with photographer Greg Semu behind the camera, it was the first to do it with beauty.

Best bit: the Sisters chillin’ in the golden afternoon sun. So cool.

Director: Greg Semu
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… too much is never enough.

Pop Art Toasters “What Am I Going To Do”

The Pop Art Toasters were a group formed by Martin Phillipps and friends, including David Kilgour, and they recorded an album of ’60s psychedelic pop covers. This caused a tear in the delicate fabric of the space-time continuum by the fact that Martin Phillipps has formed a band of entirely new people and not called it the Chills.

The video is very simple, with the band playing the song in Dunedin’s old Excelsior hotel, with a similar feeling to the Verlaine’s “Death and the Maiden” video. Martin and David are both wearing sunglasses, which is permissible if you are performing a song inside a house.

At first glance, the video feels like a bit of a shambles, but on closer viewing it’s clear that everything is quite deliberate and the bits of overexposed footage and weird camera moves are indeed all part of the plan.

Best bit: Martin’s rose-tinted spectacles.

http://youtu.be/se3VAwR-QIM

Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… there goes the neighbourhood.

The Mutton Birds “Heater”

This is the genius of the Mutton Birds – their lone number one single was a song about a heater. Not in a “baby, my love will keep u warm like a heater”, but literally about a heater, an electric heater (the elements were made of wire and clay).

The video perfectly captures the sinister tone of the lyrics, with Don McGlashan playing the heater-buyer Frank, and stop motion used to bring life to the sentient heater.

Frank takes his newly purchased heater home, where his concerned parents (including Marge from “Shortland Street” as his mum) furrow their brows with concern.

The band’s performance takes second place to the adventures of Frank, perhaps indicative of the larger budget the Mutton Birds had after signing with Virgin for their second album.

Would anyone write a song like this about an energy efficient heat pump?

Best bit: Mum is concerned when Frank doesn’t want an egg.

Director: Fane Flaws
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… pop through rose-tinted specs.

The 3Ds “Man on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”

The 3Ds are grand. “Man on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” is David Mitchell’s grunty, crunchy, tense journey into the mind of a troubled man. The video is set in an industrial wasteland, both outside in a mound of rubble and in a derelict building.

With the previous two 3Ds videos fronted by David Saunders, it’s nice to have the wild-haired Mitchell taking the lead, with the quartet rounded out by Dominic on drums and Denise holding down the low end on bass, with workladylike concentration.

Then, like many great 3Ds songs, the song veers into a wild, feedback and sample-laced wig-out, and the video practically becomes sentient, threatening to actually have a nervous breakdown and leaving the band wondering where their video funding went.

The video starts at four minutes, but the interview with the band before that is worth watching, especially if you like crunchy Hot Cakes.

Best bit: Denise’s sensible sweater.

Director: Andrew Moore
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… ladies who write.

Maree Sheehan “Kia Tu Mahea (To Be Free)”

“Kia Tu Mahea” is positive, bilingual HI-NRG dance track, though it’s just hitting the end of this particular musical style’s life in the pop charts.

The video is great – bold, colourful and sometimes split into Mondrianesque segments. Maree is joined by kapa haka performers, children, an African man, dudes in fresh urban threads, and fly girls.

Maree Sheehan always comes across with great confidence in her videos. She’s never taken the traditional video babe route (no rolling around with/in silver spandex for her), but the early ’90s feels like a kinder, gentler time when no one with NZ On Air funding was doing the hard-sell sexy video. At least not yet.

Best bit: Maree and pals in casual shorts, doing casual dancing.

Director: Matt Palmer
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… the bleak, urban wasteland that represents the soul.

The Exponents “House of Love”

“House of Love” is one of those Exponents songs that doesn’t get sing-shouted at rugby games. Tracking the demise of a relationship, where Jordan both walks in and walks out of the house of love, the video shows the Exponents playing the song in a doll’s house.

Actually, that makes it sound much cooler than it actually is, like some special effects have made it look like the Exponents are actually playing in the tiny rooms of a doll’s house. Actually, it’s just footage of the band superimposed over the front of a doll’s house. And it’s raining on the doll’s house and there’s some sort of straw strewn about in front of it. What a depressing house. No wonder Jordan’s leaving it.

The band are performing the song under colourful lights, and with window shapes projected behind them. Sometimes the band are wearing carnival masks, and sometimes Jordan takes his shirt off. I’m going to blame the Red Hot Chili Peppers for the rash of shirtlessness that started happening in music videos of the early ’90s.

Best bit: the tiny painting inside the doll’s house.

Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… casual shorts.

David Kilgour “No No No”

This is the David Kilgour video with a clear storyline. I like that. The “No No No” video images David Kilgour as an indie superstar, living like a rap star with his entourage of ageing boho friends.

Dave starts at his bohemian den, wearing his famous spotted shirt. Then he and a couple of pals get into a limousine where another boho fellow meets them. The three are driven around, drinking champagne and making phone calls on one of those giant old brick cellphones, only back in 1994 it wouldn’t quite have been hilarious old technology, but what a cellphone actually was.

All this action cuts between David playing at some sort of student gig. He’s also wearing his famous spotted shirt, so presumedly the gig is on the same night as the boho adventures.

Then it’s back to the boho den, where his boho posse is in full effect, drinking lots of wine and getting crazy. Why, one boho lady even takes off her shirt and dances around in her bra. Crazy!

Then Dave is out on the the street with all the unwanted attention of the paparazzi trying to get all up in his face because he is famous.

Best bit: David reading “L5 News”, the newsletter of the L5 Society, which promotes space colonies. Seriously.

Director: Stuart Page
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… Jordan takes his shirt off in a tiny house.

Annie Crummer “Let it Shine”

It’s a Christmas single! Interesting that the funding was given in the same month as the song was released. The video must have been made with lightning pace, right?

“Let it Shine” is a delicate Christmas song, with the same sentimental theme that Annie’s other singles had (for the children, y’all).

The video is black and white, alternating between Annie singing the song, and shots of children. The kids are either outside playing, or in the studio, sitting on a lazy susan, rotating for the camera. This makes me imagine some production hand whose job it was to lie on the ground, out of camera shot, rotating the kids, trying not to get hit by their legs.

New Zealand has never had a strong tradition of Christmas songs, especially not the upbeat style that ravages the UK charts. It seems that if a Christmas song in New Zealand is going to do anything (like each number 11 on the charts), it’s going to be a serious song like this one.

Best bit: the slightly surreal array of rotating kids.

Update: It looks like Annie Crummer’s videos are no longer available on the New Zealand MTV website. Until someone uploads them somewhere else, there’s currently nothing to watch.

Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… David’s big night out.