I have an unusually healthy supply of good videos at the moment, so I thought I might pass on three of my favourites, none of which bear much relation to one another, but all of which are cool in different ways.

First up is Kid Canaveral’s brilliant new animated video for You Only Went Out to Get Drunk Last Night, a song from their cracking album Shouting at Wildlife.  Apart from the fact that it’s just plain good to watch, it reminds me of one of the best things about being involved in music these days: you can just have a bloody go.  Time and effort and a really good idea went into that video, but from what I can tell it can’t have cost any money at all.

People do seem to confuse ‘possible’ with ‘easy’ though.  Just because costs and technology are no longer prohibitive, there is still no substitute for actually having a good idea and working really hard.  Stop-motion animation like that – especially the frankly incredible dancing kitchen – is incredibly time-consuming and there are visual ideas flowing thick and fast in this video, even though it starts a little slowly.  So you can do without money, but not without genuine creativity – kudos to David Galletly who made it.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfluYltTl2Y

Below is a video by Powerdove.  It sets archive footage of the demolition of the Star Theatre in New York against Annie Lewandowski’s gorgeous, minimal song called Lost City.  In general I would suggest that this kind of bare minimalism has to be a little careful not to drift into dullness, but when I listen to Lewandowski’s stuff the strange noises going on in the background really do lift it well above most things which might superficially be regarded as similar.

Powerdove – Sickly City from Circle Into Square on Vimeo.

And finally, this is just silly, but fun, even though the middle class dilettante hipster is the easiest of easy targets for this kind of lampooning, and it’s unlikely to ever be done as well as Nathan Barley.  Nevertheless, I found this extremely funny.

Have you noticed that recently YouTube comments aren’t as awful as they used to be.  Ever since they implemented the ability to vote things up or down you tend to get some excellent comments at the top of the page.  The winner on this one, as far as I am concerned?

“Vinyl’s too mainstream. Can I get this on wandering minstrel?”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVmmYMwFj1I

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