Death Cab for Cutie

"Crooked Teeth"



With the miracle of the internet, music videos can now be seen on demand, day or night, for free (unless you use iTunes) by bigger audiences than ever before. But this is not as great as it seems: you must sit through the same goddamn shampoo commercial every goddamn time. The fact that I was able to enjoy the video for “Crooked Teeth” despite this critical setback, says a lot about the quality of the video.

Director Ace Norton has accomplished something here: his combination of claymation and stop-motion video, a quirky homage to Steven Johnson’s video for Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” represents yet another good directorial gamble by the boys of Death Cab for Cutie. Well-known for selecting unheard-of directors, Ben Gibbard and company have struck gold with Norton, who manages to channel Nick Park (“Wallace & Gromit”) and Gustav Klimt at once. The result is both joyous and fragile, a montage of imagery and styles that suggest that everyone had some fun making the video.

Striking me rather like what Paul Klee might have created, had he been commissioned to make a music video, the imagery is at once bright and maudlin, working with a juxtaposition Death Cab knows all too well; the contrast between Gibbard’s often sorrowful lyrics and the bands poppy swing is a common theme, if not a steadfast rule, and stands out more than ever on “Crooked Teeth.”

The video is devastatingly pretty, exuding effort from every scene, and well worth the wait, no matter how long you have to listen to Pantene tell you your hair can, with their help, withstand winter’s various follicular ravages.

—Henry M. Cowles



Kanye West

"Touch the Sky"



Weren’t music videos originally conceived as a form of marketing, you know, music? Well, apparently they now require marketing of their own—at least judging by Kanye West’s “Touch the Sky,” a five-minute music video that was deemed grand enough to warrant a 30-second trailer hyping its release. But is this really surprising coming from Kanye “I Should Be in the Bible” West?

The video itself is another “cinematic” music video, which, either despite or because of all their pretensions, tend to feel like the products of film school grads not quite good enough for Hollywood but not quite honest enough to admit it. This video could have been perfectly enjoyable, if only someone involved had exercised a bit of modesty and just tried to make a music video, not a feature film.

Taking to heart the song’s chorus (“I gotta testify, come up in the spot looking extra fly/For the day I die, I’m’a touch the sky”), the clothes and chest hair in this 70’s pastiche are indeed fly. As daredevil Evel Kanyevel, West does indeed try to touch the sky and does indeed die. And if this had remained a lively take on a funk-tinged hip hop song, it would’ve been fine. But such cannot be the case with the cinematic music video: the song is interrupted by an extraordinarily unfunny interlude in which West comments on his infamous remarks about the president (here symbolized by Nixon) and two women with afros berate him for being with a white girl (Pamela Anderson).

If all of this accomplishes anything, it’s to illustrate the difference between a movie and a music video. When a character dies at the end of a movie, I usually cry. Here, I only wanted to listen to the song again. Maybe music videos are still only marketing tools, after all.

—Patrick R. Chestnut



Panic! At the Disco

“I Write Sins Not Tragedies”



It’s impossible to watch the video for “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” by Panic! At the Disco, without a sense of déjà vu. That is, unless you have never seen My Chemical Romance’s “Helena.” Compare the two and you’ll see: same shit, different sacrament. Instead of “Helena”’s all-singing, all-dancing, heavily-eyelinered funeral, we get an all-singing, all-dancing, heavily-eyelinered wedding. Plus Clowns! At the Altar.

I can’t imagine that it bodes well for the future of American culture that “heavily choreographed videos set in churches where the singer wears eyeliner” is now a full-blown genre. But despite the poor form the band displays by fully appropriating what wasn’t even a great idea in the first place, this video isn’t all that bad.

In this winkingly dramatic carnival/cabaret of insanity and hedonism, harlequins, magicians, and of course a ringmaster, invade a wedding, at which “the poor groom’s bride is a whore” and is found kissing a mime. While this has been done before, what the video lacks in originality it makes up for in exuberance.

Its saving grace is a complete lack of self-seriousness. Swirling camerawork around clowns, mimes, unicyclists, and sundry other performers is just fun and weird, with no ulterior motive. They also get credit (and a place in my nightmares) for painting stylized eyes on the eyelids of performers, a great surreal touch.

In their willingness to put entertainment value above trying and failing to be profound and angsty, Panic! In The Disco already has a leg up on their predecessors. Perhaps one day, they’ll look in the mirror, realize that the love, money, and legions of moody adolescents aren’t worth their souls, and shake free of the shackles of the self-consciously-weird-yet-strangely-bland emo aesthetic. Until then, you can find their t-shirt at Hot Topic.

—Lisa J. Bloomberg