It was only a decade ago that music videos were an unthinkable luxury for most bands. There was an air of exclusivity to them: Unless you were on a label with a decent promotional budget or had a film major in your band, you probably weren't going to get one, and even if you did, there weren’t many outlets for sharing it.
Today, of course, music videos are about as exclusive as Bandcamp pages. The Internet is flooded with more of them than even the biggest fans of the medium could ever hope to keep up with, and any local band with a modicum of ambition can make one. Most of these videos are nothing to write about—even if technology has reached the point where even many of the bad ones at least look pretty good—but there’s a crop of young directors around the city doing genuinely novel things with the form. Here are several of the more visually arresting local videos from the last few months.
Sat. Nite Duets - "The Three Wisemen"
A very literal interpretation of the space cowboy, this Sat. Nite Duets video from Travis Whitty and Eric Holman is a masterpiece of post-production. It's like the cover of every album your dad stored in crates in the basement come to life.
Like Like The The The Death - "Here Comes Irregular"
This quickie from viral-video master Jack Packard is a throwback to the "120 Minutes" era of concise, kind of funny, kind of disturbing no-budget videos. Love the song; love the batshit twist at the end; love the dog.
The Fatty Acids - "Airsick"
There's some brilliant animation and use of color in this space fantasy from Honeycomb's Kurt Raether. As good as Gravity was, if I'm being honest with myself I wish it looked a bit more like this.
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Milo - “Ecclesiastes”
Local director and part-time rapper WC Tank has a gift for mining the fantastical from the ordinary, so his take on the rap video is typically hallucinatory. In this video for Milwaukee/Chicago rapper Milo, a routine trip to the park becomes a survivalistic ordeal. Even a pizza break doesn't bring much relief, since it takes place in the back of an ambulance. A faint sense of danger and unease carries through the whole video, even its requisite live footage, which like every other scene is somehow out of step with the world as it actually is.
