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Jay Reatard has been an underground figure for ten years or so playing with bands like The Reatards and the Lost Sounds and most recently he has gained a good deal of mainstream success with his solo efforts. Going back to his earliest roots when he had recorded songs alone to escape from his home life, his solo records feature him playing every instrument and singing. When he plays live, of course, he has a backing band as can be seen here.
This video where they play ‘Oh It’s Such A Shame’ from his debut LP ‘Blood Visions’ captures the intensity of their live show. Jay Retard has become infamous for punching, kicking and spitting on his audience members during his shows. I guess it’s common knowledge that he was raised in some shitty circumstances and not surprising that he has some socialization issues, but he still puts on a great show.
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Royksopp is an electronic duo from Norway started in the late 90s by Torbjorn Brundtland and Svien Berge. They have experienced moderate success and their music has been used for commercials by companies such as Apple and the BBC.
This video is for their song ‘Remind Me’ from their first album, ‘Melody A.M.’ and it features some really cool animation. The video seems to represent the general absurdity, over complication and detachment that goes on every day in modern city life.
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This is a music video collaboration put together by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas. The concept is basically just putting music to Barack Obama’s famous ‘Yes We Can’ speech and having various celebrity guests do voice-over. It sounds like kind of a lame idea but the video/song actually came out pretty good.
Familiar faces you might spot in here include: Scarlett Johansson, Jesse Dylan, common, Tatyana Ali, John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Kate Walsh, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Adam Rodriguez, Kelly Hu, Amber Valetta, Eric Balfour, Aisha Tyler, Nicole Scherzinger and Nick Cannon.
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This is a classic Wu-Tang Clan video from their 1997 ‘Wu-Tang Forever’ album. The Wu-Tang Clan is a New York based hip-hop collective featuring RZA (aka Bobby Digital), GZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Method Man, Raekwon, Gostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa and U-God. Since the release of their first album, ‘36 Chambers: Enter the Wu-Tang’, most of the members of the Wu-Tang clan have gone on to release successful solo albums. Their latest album, ‘8 Diagrams’ is also worth checking out.
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Genghis Tron are a three piece band from Philadelphia that do an impressive job of combining two very different styles of music: extreme metal and electronica. It doesn’t sound good on paper, but after hearing this song, Board Up The House (from their album of the same name) I was sold.
The video just captures their elaborate live show. To compensate for the fact that their live performance is more or less just three dudes playing with computers, they play with a bunch of visual/light effects sequenced to their music. Pretty neat.
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Pulley was something of a pop-punk supergroup with members of Ten Foot Pole and Strung Out. The band was started after singer Scott Radinsky was kicked out of Ten Foot Pole for not having enough time to commit to the band (in addition to being a singer, Radinsky was also a Major League Baseball relief pitcher.)
The song ‘Cashed In’ is from their 1996 debut, Esteem Driven Engine. The song outlines Radinsky’s reaction to the commercialization of punk music. Radinsky (along with most of the other members of Pulley) was a veteran pioneer of the pop-punk movement before it was commercially viable and the historical importance of their former bands is often overlooked because they didn’t strive to achieve mainstream success.
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Midnight Juggernauts are a Melbourn, Australia-based indie rock/electronic band. After a series of EPs they put out their debut album ‘Dystopia’ on Siberian Records in 2007. It’s a great album start-to-finish, my favorite tracks were ‘Nine Lives’, ‘Ending of an Era’ and ‘Road to Recovery’ The band features Vincent Vendetta, Andy Juggernaut and Daniel Stricker; they often draw comparisons to David Bowie and Kraftwerk.
Remember the Crystal Castles video I posted? Well Midnight Juggernauts have toured with Crystal Castles.
See more on the Midnight Juggernauts
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A friend sent me this video for MGMT’s song ‘Time To Pretend’ and both the video and the song have really been growing on me. MGMT, consisting of Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden just released an album on Columbia called ‘Oracular Spectacular.’
If you pay close attention to the video, you’ll notice a reference to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s psychedelic opus, The Holy Mountain, about halfway through. The video itself is pretty psychedelic itself, they seem to have deliberately used some crappy editing to finish the effect. I really like the backing bass/synth in this song, I just wish there were live drums instead of the drum track. The lyrics are obviously meant to be ironic, poking fun at the typical idea of rock star success.
for the full effect, i would watch the hi-res version available here: http://court13.com/TimeToPretend_480.mov
