Tag: music video

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: Dead Soldiers

Music Video Monday is feeling your Monday pain. 

Dead Soldiers are one of Memphis’ hottest live acts, and if you’ve ever seen them play, you know why. Their music is folky, but the energy with which they deliver it on stage rivals the raunchiest rockers. Their new music video gives you a little taste of their passionate delivery. “Sixteen Tons” is a country folk classic by Merle Travis that was made famous by Tennesse Ernie Ford. Joined by guests from Columbia, Missouri band Hooten Hallars, the Soldiers attack the song, bringing out the piece’s grinding, working class frustration with a death metal roar. Directors Michael Jasud and Sam Shansky and cinematographer Joey Miller cast the performance in a stark black and white. This one’s for all y’all suffering through yet another Monday morning working in the proverbial coal mines. 

Music Video Monday: Dead Soldiers

If you would like to see your music video on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: Chris Milam

Music Video Monday has news for you. 

Chris Milam’s new music video, “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know”, pays homage to one of the earliest, and most famous, music videos. In May 1965, documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker had following Bob Dylan to London while filming his seminal rock documentary Dont Look Back. Dylan wrote the lyrics to his song “Subterranean Homesick Blues” on a handful of cue cards, and Pennebaker and crew popped out back of the Savoy Hotel to film a short title sequence for the documentary. The resulting promo clip was an instant classic that has been parodied, emulated, and revered over the years. 

Milam enlisted Memphis experimental film auteur Ben Siler to riff on the timeless concept for his song “Tell Me Something I Didn’t Know”. Where Dylan had a cameo by Beat poet Alan Ginsberg, Milam and Siler got a cavalcade of Memphians to silently confess their secrets on camera, ranging from touching to funny to harrowing. Milan says the total budget for the video, shot on an iPhone, was “about $9”, but the results prove that some ideas are evergreen, and you don’t have to have elaborate sets or costumes to make a great music video. 

Music Video Monday: Chris Milam

If you would like to see your music video on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: Deering and Down

Today’s Music Video Monday takes its protein pills and puts its helmet on. 

Memphis by way of Alaska duo Deering and Down are Music Video Monday veterans. We’re glad the prolific songwriters are equally prolific music video makers. This clip for Rev. Neil Down’s song “Spaced Out Like An Astronaut” was shot by Lanha Deering, Rev. Down, Memphis super-producer Doug Easley, and Sam Shansky, all on their iPhones. Deering then cut the footage together into a blissed-out trip by a couple of barely earthbound astral travelers. 

Music Video Monday: Deering and Down

If you’d like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: Frenchie

Today’s Music Video Monday is getting up in your face.

“#Renegades” is the first video from Memphis millenial popster Frenchie. Directed by Andrew Trent Fleming, it brings the band’s energetic show up close with the fans. Here’s a blast of positive pop rock to kick off your week. 

Music Video Monday: Frenchie

If you’d like to see your video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Whatever: The Grifters

Today’s Music Video Monday is on Thursday. Forgive me.  

On Monday, between finishing up my cover story about Memphis documentary filmmakers traveling to South Sudan and watching and reviewing Finding Dory, I neglected to bring you, loyal Memphis Flyer readers, a music video on Monday. The time to remedy that is now. 

In light of the news that the seminal Memphis indie rock albums One Sock Missing and Crappin’ You Negative by The Grifters are getting a long-overdue re-release courtesy of Fat Possum Records, here’s a video from the band’s 2013 music video campaign. “Teenage Jesus” was directed by Grifters bassist Trip Lamkins and Justin Thompson. The song from the One Sock Missing shows the band at their ragged best, and the video features…wait for it… an adolescent Jesus on a skateboard. 

Music Video Whatever: The Grifters

If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: Crown Vox

It’s a witchy Music Video Monday. 

Crown Vox is the creation of singer songwriter Jennifer Burris, who has assumed a Bowie-esque alter ego for this concept album. “Crown Vox is a character that I created, with all of the music being written from her perspective. I have also written a story which connects the music in a unified narrative. The first video I’m releasing, ‘No Loving But Yours’ drops you in the middle of that story. We start off in a confusing environment of conflict, violence, and sensuality with the intention of leaving the viewer with a number of questions. My goal is to answer these questions by continuing to build out the story at both ends through music, visual imagery, and videos. It will be up to the viewer to piece together these clues and decipher what’s REALLY happening in this fictional realm,”

The video was directed by Mitch Martin. “With influences like Game of Thrones and American Horror Story, this journey with the tyrant queen, Crown Vox, will have no shortage of dark and twisted turns,” says Burris.  

Music Video Monday: Crown Vox

If you would like to see your video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: Caleb Sweazy

Today’s Music Video Monday’s could prove fatal. 

Today we have the world premiere of the latest single from Caleb Sweazy’s Music + Arts / Blue Barrel Records release Lucky Or Strong. The video for “Bluebird Wings” was directed by his wife Melissa Anderson Sweazy. who calls it “Double Indemnity meets ‘Last Dance with Mary Jane’. I¹ve long been a fan of noir films and I¹m particularly fascinated by the trope of the femme fatale, the construct of the dangerous, duplicitous woman who often has a deeply conflicted, cat-and-mouse relationship with the detective. But maybe its more like a dog with a squirrel. What happens when the chase is over and she finally catches her prey?”

The video stars Caleb Sweazy and the Memphis Flyer’s own Eileen Townsend. It was shot by Ryan Earl Parker, who also did the outstanding color work in post production, and edited by Laura Jean Hocking. 

Music Video Monday: Caleb Sweazy

If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com. 

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: Julien Baker

This Music Video Monday does it in one take. 

Ever since she graced our cover last fall, Julien Baker’s star has been rising. In one month, the troubador will make her Beale Street Music Festival debut. This video, shot by Memphis filmmaker Breezy Lucia in a Downtown parking garage, really gives you a sense of Baker’s raw talent. It’s all one take, with audio recorded from an on-camera microphone, and Baker nails her song “Something” in one take. Seriously, you have to hear this one. 

Music Video Monday: Julien Baker

If you would like to see your video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: Mung

Don’t call today’s Music Video Monday a comeback! 

Actually, you can call it a comeback. Long before Dethklok ruled the basic cable mindspace, there was another band known as the Four Horsemen of the Metal Apocalypse. Mung was a tongue-in-cheek group of metalheads consisting of Joey “Joecephus” Killingsworth, Josey Van HellSing (Wade Long), Zim (John Pickle), Varmint (Mike Matthews), and Suzy Savage (Rhiannon Smith). Under the direction of Memphis underground video pioneer John PIckle, the band shot a pilot intended to sell to network TV. “We did a VH1 Behind The Music sort of thing about Mung,” Pickle recalls.

The pilot effort was not successful, and much of the raw footage was lost for years, until Pickle accidentally uncovered it and edited this video together out of some of the recovered material. “I saw this old footage and thought, there’s no sense in letting all this stuff go to waste.”

The director says the video for The Spell Song—Mung’s theme song—was shot in his living room. “We put a bunch of garbage bags up over the walls and windows and just went at it,” he says. 

This Wednesday night, Mung will return after an eight year hiatus to open for Mac Sabbath, the McDonald’s themed Black Sabbath cover band, for one can’t miss night of metal and comedy at the Hi-Tone. “We picked up right where we left off eight years ago,” Pickle says. 

Music Video Monday: Mung

If you would like to see your video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: Dog Police

Today’s Music Video Monday is keeping the peace. The dog peace. 

The 1980s were a strange time. Many elements in today’s music culture were born in the crucible of the Regan era. Many things then thought ephemeral have unexpectedly lasted. Music videos rose to prominence with MTV. Synth pop, which was relegated to a joke by the end of the decade, is now the default setting for 21st century pop. 

And then there was Dog Police, the Memphis synth band combo of Tony Thomas, Sam Shoup, and Tom Lonardo, who, influenced by Devo and a sense of general New Wave insanity, created a novelty hit out of their band’s theme song. Music Video Monday is always searching for earlier and earlier Memphis music videos, and this one, directed by Joe Mulherin in 1984, is among the earliest. The production values on display here, from the videography to the makeup and staging, are pretty impressive, and the song…well, the song will probably get stuck in your head for a while. You can thank Music Video Monday later. 

Music Video Monday: Dog Police

If you would like to see your work featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com