Noel Gallagher swoops in with his High Flyin’ Birds crew to deliver a beautiful message about the world from space, Jersey punks Screaming Females paint up dirge-y frustrated love message on a rural Illinois wall, Diplo lands in embargo-lifted Cuba and more, in the 46th week of the year’s Best Lyric Vids.
Screaming Females – ‘Deeply‘
Singer and lead guitarist Marissa Patemoster reduces her usual Siouxsie and the Banshees‘ howl to a yearn-and-burn pine on this third single from the Jersey punk trio’s LP7, All At Once, on a dirge-y blend of keyboard-led orch-pop dealing in a frustrated relationship chock full of bittersweet tension. For the video, Patemoster scrawled on the wall of a venue in rural Illinois while on tour:
Noel Gallagher’s High Flyin’ Birds – ‘It’s a Beautiful World‘
Diffusing all the brotherly fussin’ and fuedin’ he and his brother Liam get into more consistent than a Netflix original series lineup, Noel chimes in with rose-colored, Thom Yorke-ian drum machine rocker message about this spinning rock we’re all on, pushing his High Flyin’ Birds crew’s latest record, Who Built the Moon? A montage of satellite images of Earth support this message, as does French singer Charlotte Marionneau, while the lyrics splay like archival projector slide subtext below, hammering it all home:
Yukon Blonde – ‘Crazy‘
Come for the 50s Hollywood space b-roll, stay for the rocket-ship made of lipstick, and, of course, these BC dance-pop upstarts’ take on a classic lyric twist about being both crazy and crazy in love. It’s like the Twilight Zone delivered via Cut Copy inside a disco ball:
Maude – ‘Cloud Nine‘
Strewn together with clips taken by his bandmates and gig photos by Alyza Geraldine Abacan around the Philippines, vocalist Luis Azcona told Billboard he kind of went into the song aimlessly, final creative outcome-wise — hence the non-linear splatter of city-shots, live photos and animation punctuated the soft-rock gleam. Seemed to do him some cathartic good, whatever he did, as the narrative shapes up to be a classic jealous ex-love exhumation of a failed relationship:
Diplo – ‘Get it Right‘ ft. MØ
Gotta give Diplo credit for his ability to boil a hook radio-ready like a master chef poaching an egg. Laced together for a a documentary about Cuba’s trade embargo being lifted and some of the first international and American artists to perform there, dubbed Give Me Future, it’s paint-by-numbers monster piano-and-bass-drop filler in all the best ways, speaking to the uniting powers of music, while the video is a mesmerizing, morphing polyptych the streets and hearts of Cuba:
