Music Blog
It's been a great year for music videos in our fair city, but the dwindling sunlight and days left on the calendar couldn't stop these two excellent late entries from making their way into the world.
First is a recent video from previous studio session guests The Dandy Warhols. Courtney Taylor-Taylor wrote "Autumn Carnival" with David J, of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets, it was inspired by the Ray Bradbury novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the way we romanticize our youth, even more so as it slowly but continually fades. The song would fit seamlessly into the best '80s gothic mixtapes, and makes effective and chilly use of the calliope.
The video is by French director Thomas Rhazi, and follows a disaffected young boy who lives in Blackpool, England, near the country's largest amusement park, Pleasure Beach. The place looks cold, bleak, and half-abandoned, though. Wearing a skeleton costume (a body without flesh, or the Latin carne), he looks for life in a seemingly lifeless place (despite being a carnival).
The end, however, suggests that he may be able to make a new life for himself.
The Dandy Warhols have four shows this weekend, at the Mission Theater and the Doug Fir. Info here.
While the previous song owes to Ray Bradbury, the video for Denver's "The Way It Is" draws heavily on Patrick Swayze's 1989 classic film Road House. Director Patrick Stanton puts the band on a country bar's stage, behind chicken wire, which is fitting for their sound, and also turns out to be fortunate for them. It's all broken bottle bar brawl after about the first minute. Look for a few familiar Portland faces getting smashed.
Patrick Stanton also directed St. Vincent's "Laughing with a Mouth of Blood" video, set in in Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein's Women and Women First bookstore a few months before the first episode of Portlandia aired. Denver recently visited the train tracks out behind our studios.
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