Gross! In a fun Garbage Pail Kids way. But wait: under the coy crude veneer of Allen Cordell’s music videos for Beach House, Tobacco and Future Islands, there’s a natural grace at work. An innate understanding of rhythm, a surprising sympathy for our fellow man. Characters with creepy faces dance angrily amidst gooey special effects, and somehow, the repressed desires bubbling beneath the surface manage to wrench your heart. Or maybe that’s backwards— maybe it starts with a sense of humanity and then pulls the rug out to reveal the absurd. Like, “Longing. It’s beautiful, yeah, but it’s also ridiculous.” Either way, misery and frustration are the unlikely fuel for a nervous humor here. We’re encouraged to laugh, even as we cheer on the lonesome-hearted.

Cordell’s paintings exist in a similar cloud of uncertainty, appropriating images of pornography, horror films, animals and anonymous strangers to unsettling effect. Those thrilling and frightening parts of childhood rendered in sharp relief.

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There’s a buzzing in the air, a dual feeling of danger and excitement— destruction and creativity— in the fallen urban environments that fuel director Shan Nicholson’s work. His lush new video for El-P’s haunting instrumental “Time Won’t Tell,” revels in a nostalgia for the anarchic freedom of childhood, and heralds the pleasure of building something new out of the ashes of something old.

It’s almost a direct dramatization of the themes underlying Downtown Calling, Nicholson’s first documentary and the story of New York City in the late 70’s. Narrated by Debbie Harry, it’s a movie all about self-made entertainment blossoming from an environment of social unrest and economic chaos. In retrospect, it seems crazy. What enabled the downtown renaissance in New York when many other major metropoleis just crumble with a whimper? What’s the magic ingredient that makes the boys in “Time Won’t Tell” play instead of fight?

In that same era, the EPA decided to give rad photographers money to take amazingly frank pictures of urban decay, and they called it Documerica. Somehow it feels like the whole thing would be decried as “communism” these days, making the existence of these images all the more miraculous. After the jump, take a look at some of Danny Lyon’s phenomenal photographs of New York kids from Documerica.

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The sounds that emerge from the clear red vinyl of Superhumanoids’ Urgency EP feel like home. It’s the kind of music that instantly puts your nerves at ease on a long nighttime drive, striking a perfect balance between shoegazing coziness and dreamy danceability. Superhumanoids are not only an impossibly charming L.A. indie pop quartet, but also one of my favorite new bands this year— so it is with great honor that I present to you the exclusive world-wide debut of their brand new music video!

Watch the wistful and hilarious “Persona” above, and then read on for an interview with razor-sharp director Eli Gunn-Jones!

Where did the idea behind “Persona” stem from?

Oftentimes I prefer my videos to echo the theme or premise of the song, or at the very least have some sort of tangential relationship to the track. After talking with Cameron for a bit about what Persona meant to him—how it was conceived, the writing process, etc— I let it float around my head for a while. I kept coming back to the idea of surveillance, of trying to encapsulate or define another through a wide swath of observations both traditional and unusual. Trying to understand somebody’s core without any personal interaction. The other elements like the 70s attire, vintage recording gear, his car, those were all stylistic choices to better engage the audience and create a fuller, more complete world.

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Video for Caribou’s “Sun,” directed by Simon Owens. What fun! But how do I find this mysterious, Inland Empire-esque ballroom? Maybe it’s like that episode of Beverly Hills, 90210, where the gang exchanged an egg to get directions to the “secret underground club” where Emily Valentine laced Brandon’s drink with U4EA.

I love Rafter, I love Asthmatic Kitty, I love this video and I love director Matt Wells! He was last seen directing Tim Heidecker in a video for Clues’ “You Have My Eyes Now,” a slow-motion feast for the eyes ruminating on the crushing social barriers standing in the way of human-mannequin love.

Visual artist Eric Lindley records gorgeous, sorrowful music under the moniker Careful. Shades of Arthur Russell, Chris Garneau, and Xiu Xiu lurk in the corners of his sonic palette, as Lindley balances subtle sonic experimentation with acoustic tranquility. His new album, Oh, Light, was recorded in the refuge of his partner’s darkened closet over the period of a month, and feels at once intimate and layered, beckoning the listener for frequent returns to its chest of aural wonders.

In the afterglow of a coveted shout-out by the New York Times, the record will get its physical release in stores tomorrow. To celebrate, we’re giving a copy away on Future Shipwreck! Just comment on this post to qualify! A lucky winner will be chosen by random selection tomorrow night.

Listen to the album in full, below. I’d have to say my favorite tracks are “Scrappy” and “Oi, etc.” Also, watch Nicholas Girder’s experimental videos for “Fox and His Friends” and “Laid, or Lain” after the jump.

UPDATE: The winner, chosen via random number generator, is Ben Prisbylla! Thanks everyone for playing!

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…While making the remix, my mind started working in 3/4 and 6/8 time. I started looking around for tracks in that time signature to make a mix, I wasn’t intending to but I couldn’t help it. It was all a big swirl. After a while I heard it everywhere. In soul ballads, in polyrhythmical african pop, in old movies. In the ocean waves tumbling in against the shore, in the beat of a lovers heart. One two three, one two three…

Brooklyn band Neighbors are making some glorious music. My bud Matt Rubin just released their first 7”, Hooligans, on Paper Brigade— but my judgement has not been swayed by mere bonds of familiarity— Neighbors’ twinkling tunes simply fit inside my brain like the missing piece of an uncompleted snyth-pop puzzle, somewhere between early The The, Pet Shop Boys, and Passion Pit. In just four songs, Neighbors create a sonic world that’s both cinematic and epically personal. But don’t take my word for it— listen:

The recent M.I.A./New York Times controversy has just been kind of boring on all fronts. I’ve skipped a lot of the web chatter on the matter, but I did read Nitsuh Adebe’s thoughtful and measured analysis for Pitchfork, and the one good thing I took away from it was an appreciation for M.I.A.’s Nigerian (by way of London) protege, Afrikan Boy.

His image of a third-world hustle is a hundred times more resonant than most of M.I.A.’s— it involves standing out on the highway selling sugar. On one of his own tracks, “Lidl”, it’s about sneaking into the UK and getting caught shoplifting from supermarket chains.

Compare this with M.I.A., who so often wraps herself in the idea of political violence and armed resistance— things that make a much more exciting package for Western audiences, but can also be a lot more cartoonish and self-aggrandizing. Part of it is surely just the background difference between Nigeria and Tamil Sri Lanka, but M.I.A.’s the one trying to bridge these things. If she ever talked about a plastic bag full of gasoline, you get the feeling she’d add a match and make it a bomb. If it were Afrikan Boy, it’d just be something kids sell to people with cars to make a little money. Afrikan Boy is being funny in “Lidl”, and yet I still take what he’s saying way more seriously than I take the popstar who introduced me to him.

With or without authentic third-world street cred, Afrikan Boy’s music is just plain fun and catchy. Plus he’s adorable and never seems to stop smiling!

Michael Berryhill’s paintings exude vibes of the surreal yet stoic variety. The unnerving echo of a pulse seems to beat under each still life. Mostly, we are presented with inexplicable assemblages of inanimate objects: some real, some abstract. The human consciousness at their core is hidden from view, but easily perceived. A book pretends it is just a book, a form does its best to appear form-ish— but we know better.

Gay Pride Moustache, 2008

The objects Berryhill represents aren’t just visually pleasing, they’re relatable. You find yourself identifying with a draped piece of fabric, a blue polyhedron floating in pink mist. Though static, they manage to convey some element of the artist’s personality that’s just immediately likable. These paintings prove that anthropomorphism isn’t a quality reserved for talking animals and furniture with faces, it can be achieved subtly, graciously.

Harry Dean Stand-In, 2008

There’s something positively De Chirico-esque at work. Berryhill manages to activate that same epic feeling of gazing out into the courtyard of your subconscious, but instead of marble columns and Classical statuary we’re given guitar necks and long-haired doodz staring intently at lord knows what.

These are the beautifully distorted tableaus you take for granted in your deepest dreams, where you’re running late for band practice and you suddenly realize you’ve never played an instrument in your life and that dead pet bird you had when you were 12 is now alive again, but also on fire. Here, in the waking world, Berryhill has entrusted us with the time and opportunity to take in their aesthetic merits without all of those distractions. You’re welcome.

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Andreas Nilsson is a Swedish painter who fell into making music videos thanks to his rad collaborations with The Knife. He’s also one of the few truly great music video directors working today. On top, his lovely new clip for Miike Snow’s “Rabbit,” which pays homage to 2 Live Crew in the most magical way. Below, his simply transcendental Peter, Bjorn & John video, “It Don’t Move Me.”

Ladysmith Black Mambazo x M.J. What is perfection but a blissful marriage of image and sound, song and dance?

I love the totally epic animated music video for Denki Groove’s “Hikenai Guitar wo Hikundaze.” It was directed by the band’s frontman, Pierre Taki, and manga artist Masakazu Amahisa— a duo that collaborated on several other trippendicular videos for Denki Groove. Below you’ll find a video including the collaborators’ “Mr. Empty,” along with another song I don’t know the name of, featuring a Sailor Moon-esque salaryman magically transforming loafers into sushi and chihuahuas into microscopes:

Pat Vamos makes melancholy and comical rogue music videos using re-appropriated footage from British railroad safety films, Beverly Hills babes VHS tapes, and forgotten Elliot Gould sci-fi B-movies. Here are three of his clips for Ghosty, Wavves and Best Coast.

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