December 2007: Aaradhna, All Left Out, Andrew Mockler, Atlas, Audio Empire, Bleeders

The Wild West, sad basketball, midday in Moscow, a sin city implosion, and the last job of Andy’s Floral Deliveries.

Aaradhna “Betcha By Golly Wow”

Aaradhna’s version of “Betcha By Golly Wow” is pretty faithful to the Stylistics definitive version. The video, though, has a strangely downbeat feeling to it. The cute love song is illustrated with Aaradhna doing urban casual vamp style, looking sad as she watches her sweetie play basketball. It feels like something is missing.

Director: Ivan Slavov
Nga Taonga Sound & Vision

All Left Out “The Fight”

The ongoing saga of All Left Out’s music video hero continues. First he built a plane, then he found himself at a waterfall, now he has time- (and space-) travelled from the 1940s New Zealand to the American Wild West. The video was filmed at the Old West Town attraction (south of Taumarunui), a recreation of a Wild West town. But given the song both lyrically and musically evokes that American Western style, the setting seems appropriate, if not a little predictable. The song ends with a spoken bit about finding God, a reminder of All Left’s Out’s Christian roots.

Director: Ivan Slavov

Andrew Mockler “She Waits”

Andrew’s official bio notes that this song “reached #1 on the New Zealand iTunes singer songwriter chart in 2010.” It turned out there is such a chart, though these days it’s about 90% Ed Sheeran (and 10% James Bay). The video is set in Moscow (!) and features Cheekbones Mockler wandering the city, mourning a lost love. It’s always the splendid churches and lavish railway stations that provide the exotic backdrop, never a Soviet-era apartment block. The song is pretty bland, so in comparison the video is much more exciting.

Director: Shae Sterling

2007-atlas-is-this-realAtlas “Downfall” – missing

There’s no sign of a video for “Downfall”, but iTunes has two videos for the band’s first single “Is This Real”. The first version was released, without funding, in 2006; the second in 2008. Could the “Downfall” funding instead have gone to making a slicker video for “Is This Real”?

Audio Empire “Goodbye Las Vegas”

I’ve noticed two things about Ivan Slavov videos: he’s a fan of using video library footage, and he often shows quite literal depictions of song lyrics. That means this video is full of clips of, yes, Las Vegas. The band perform the song in a random studio location, while their shots are cut with epic aerial footage of Vegas at night. The video is bookended with news footage of the 2007 implosion of the Stardust casino, just in case the main video didn’t have enough Vegas-as-emotional-state metaphors.

Director: Ivan Slavov
Nga Taonga Sound & Vision

Bleeders “No Hope Left”

The video opens with an intriguing situation – a man wearing overalls for “Andy’s Floral Deliveries” lies sprawled on the ground in a forest, obviously seriously injured. What’s happened? The video tells his story, which is basically that the delivery guy was locked in a car boot (abducted, we assume), escaped from the moving car and ended up running into the woods where he fell down a steep hill. This is all shown backwards, cut with a forwards Bleeders performing the song. The Bleeders are always shown with a red filter, foreshadowing the red glow in the car boot from the rear lights. This was the band’s final funded video, with the Wikipedia article optimistically noting that the band is “on hiatus”.

Director: Andy Morton
Nga Taonga Sound & Vision

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