Full Screen collects all of the remarkable videos we've seen in the last 24 hours.
Belle And Sebastian, "The Party Line"
Call me self-centred, but I'm usually more inclined to watch a video if I recognize someone in it. That means I'm watching a lot of clips by Toronto bands set at, like, The Silver Dollar (usually with a cameo by Dan Burke), but this new video from Belle And Sebastian, patron saints of Glasgow cardigan pop, is shot at the Great Hall in Toronto. And, surprise surprise, I do recognize a few of those bangs and glasses. Turns out some of my friends were born to star in Belle And Sebastian videos.
Produced, written and directed by Leblanc + Cudmore (Chart Attack favourites, lately), the characteristically epic, cinematic video features multiple fantasy dance sequences that heighten as the video goes on. If all your friends at Long Winter could dance like they were choreographed by Robert Binet, it might look something like this. Scott Cudmore explains in an email how the whole thing came together:
The amazing choreographer on this, Robert Binet, came attached to the project as he has been working on some things with the band. So from the start the video was going to feature dance. The song reminded me of the fantasy of nightlife, which isn’t really the reality of it, more the way we idealize it. So I wanted to express that in the context of the cinema.
As it goes on and she goes deeper in the fantasy, the way we film it and tell the story gets more and more fantastic in a cinematic sense. And then of course, none of that is real - the way we idealize things and the way the cinema represents things. Dance and musicals are really the perfect vehicle for an idea like that because of course nobody dances like that in the context of everyday life - it’s beautiful and surreal and like a dream.
A lot of the cast came out voluntarily responding to a post that the band put up on their website and Facebook and Twitter…they were all amazing and we’re indebted to them. The dancers are all from the National Ballet of Canada. Sofia Banzhaf is the star and she really is perfect I think. She makes it work.
Belle And Sebastian's new album Girl In Peacetime Want To Dance is out January 20 via Matador. Pre-order it here.
Moon, "Gomorrah"
Moon comes from a close-knit scene of neo-Halifax pop weirdos that exists in the here and now (somewhere around Gus' Pub), but a great psych tune stands outside of time and space. And so the propulsive jangle of "Gomorrah" warps perfectly into the found footage collage of its video, edited together from grainy clips of flowers, seals, swings, sunsets and "the softness of the perpetual summers night," all found at the Nova Scotia Public Archive. It might have always existed.
Moon's new self-titled album is out December 23 via Bruised Tongue. Buy "Gomorrah" here.
Angel Olsen, "Windows"
Great American film director Rick Alverson (The Comedy) delivered a slice of powerful existential sadism in his music video for Unknown Mortal Orchestra's "From The Sun." In "Windows," a track from Angel Olsen's Burn Your Fire For No Witness reissue, he takes us on a journey of domestic interiors, gorgeously considered and composed down to Olsen's wordless performance as an unsatisfied parent.
The deluxe edition of Angel Olsen's Burn Your Fire For No Witness is out now via Jagjaguwar.
FULL SCREEN: Belle And Sebastian throw a ball at Toronto’s Great Hall by Chart Attack | Chart Attack.