"Amarantine"

Enya



The video for her new single “Amarantine” raises an immediate and perplexing question: Is Enya supposed to be goth now? Maybe it’s just her jet-black dye job, ghostly pale complexion, and blood-red sateen dress throwing me off, but I swear I saw her queued for the midnight screening of “Rocky Horror Picture Show” last Friday. Or maybe that was her stocking up on pancake face powder at Hot Topic.

Unfortunately, all of this posturing hasn’t improved her music. She’s still peddling the same coma-inducing New Age white noise your mom and Peter Jackson seem to love. Why, oh why, was this woman allowed on the “Lord of the Rings” soundtrack?

The video is an apt visual complement to the song; it too is insufferably boring. As far as I can tell, the director’s premise for the shoot was “Enya putzing around in Middle Earth.”

In the video, the spritely Celtodiva meanders through a forest set, (eerily reminiscent of the Shire) singing to herself and collecting fairy dust as rain falls gently. She later climbs atop a mountain overlook and launches her dust into the heavens, where each luminescent granule is transformed into a star.

At this point, for Enya to mount a winged unicorn and fly to a castle in the clouds would not have been all that surprising, but the video mercifully ends before the director can conjure up any more scenarios cribbed from the artwork of middle-school girls.

You’d think if she was going to dabble in the goth aesthetic she might at least toss a couple of Danzig riffs into the new single. Alas, no such luck. Bela Lugosi must be turning in his grave.

—Bernard L. Parham



Very Loud

The Shout Out Louds



I fell in love with the Shout Out Louds as soon as I played their EP—which I recovered from the garbage can in the Record Hospital room at WHRB. Yes, it’s completely accessible, completely Swedish pop of the first order, and I’m not ashamed at all to say I adore it. While RH threw this one in the dumpster, I can assure you that this is the next big thing in “No, I heard of them first” indie rock: you heard it here first.

The video for their best song, “Very Loud,” fits just about perfectly. It’s mostly some bewildered traipsing about in the woods, but thankfully directors Ted (the bassist) and Tom (a bassist in another Swedish band) Malmros avoid the high-brow, high-budget traipsing of Coldplay’s nerdy video for “The Scientist.” No sir, it’s just good, clean (cheap) fun for THIS European pop-rock getup.

As it turns out, this Malmros team is responsible for ALL of the group’s videos, which combine a delightful low-budget honesty with some startlingly artistic cinemachoreotography. The group’s frontman, who is a dead-on Swedish Jason Schwartzman/Luke Wilson mash-up, is lost at night in some Northland woods, carrying a shiny red suitcase past electronics, musical instruments, and various band members strewn about in the snow, singing all the while. Little Red Riding Hood? The Chronicles of Narnia? Robert Frost? Obviously the Shout Out Louds are on par with the best of literary-metaphoric writers. Or are they?

What does it all mean? A lamp that, when lit, turns day to night...a path beaten back and forth through birch trees...a burnished red suitcase succumbing to the snow? The weight of these metaphors is far beyond my pseudo-science concentrator capabilities. I’ll leave the interpretation to you, literati. . . suffice to say that the video is worth a watch, if just for the chance to hear the song for the first time. To top it off, the glowing winter-woods imagery might even remind you of sledding at night in the woods in Duluth, Minnesota that time during spring break of my senior year of high school. Or of some lame memory of your own.

—Henry M. Cowles



Believe

Fort Minor



Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda would love for you to know that he is tremendously clever. Clever enough, according to his website, to give his new group the name Fort Minor to “reflect the dynamic between opposites,” and to write all the songs on his new album.

Rest assured, Shinoda hastens to assure his implausibly numerous fans that he is still “an essential shard in the mosaic of Linkin Park,” whose work is “searing.” You can sleep easy knowing that Shinoda will continue to bring his “appetite for striking new ground” to his work with Fort Minor.

Never having been a fan, I can’t speak to the “mosaic” of Linkin Park, but after watching the video for Fort Minor’s “Believe Me,” the only thing I felt like striking was Shinoda. Rapping (and I use the term loosely) in some sort of vaguely-defined warehouse environment, he and his bandmates indulge in heterosexual man-hugs, random flaunting of jewelry, and unforgivably literal interpretation of lyrics.

The last is most annoying; all the pointing on the word “you,” finger-walking on the word “walk,” and flinging apart of arms on the word “free” might have been intended to be dramatic, but instead look like a half-assed sign language translation. In case the gestures weren’t obvious enough, the camera pans to the floor on the word “ground.” Unfortunately it doesn’t stay there long.

The video offers delights not only for the hearing-impaired, but also for those who like shiny things. In addition to the bling, which awkwardly adorns the neck of a skinny white guy, there are somersaulting planes of greenish light at random points, and the oddly Britney Spears-esque chorus is sung by translucent hologram faces in the same shade of green superimposed over the more corporeal band members.

It’s difficult to say whether this dubious move was made to provide visual interest or because none of the band members wanted to be associated with the chorus (I would understand the latter). What is clear is that Mike Shinoda has no compelling reason to inflict himself and his “music” on the world through two bands; one was far more than enough.

—Elisabeth J. Bloomberg