Alex G – Brite Boy (Music Video)

by Steven Spoerl

alexg

As explained in the last post, it’s been fairly difficult to get posts up over the past few months, so a bit  of catching up is in order. A lot of outstanding music videos have been released in that time, so we’ll be focusing on some of the very finest in the featured slots and granting the others some of the recognition they deserve in the lists that run at the bottom of these posts. Alex G‘s “Brite Boy” finds itself in the featured spot here- and with good reason.

So often, artists go for the most direct, immediate, accessible route and find reasonable levels of success. The artists that opt to eschew that approach in favor of more understated work have a much steeper battle to fight. Alex G has always been one of the artists that belongs to that latter camp and that aspect of the artist’s aesthetic is brought to the forefront in the animated clip for “Brite Boy”. A continuously-evolving collage of surrealist cartoon imagery (while still making room for two concrete characters wrapped up in a tragic narrative), the Elliot Bech-directed clip enhances both the song’s sense of subdued melancholy and its damaged sense of hope, rendering it an inexplicably moving experience. A palpable sense of loss dominates the latter half of “Brite Boy” and, by the time the clip draws to a close, manages to cut astonishingly deep.

Watch “Brite Boy” below, pick up a copy of Beach Music here, and explore a list of some of the best music videos of the past few months underneath the embed.

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Twin Limb – Don’t Even Think
Monogold – Pink Lemonade
Winter – All The Things You Do
Patsy’s Rats – Burnin’  Honey
White Reaper – Make Me Wanna Die
Daughter – Numbers
Speedy Ortiz – My Dead Girl
Laika’s Orbit – No Matter What It Takes
Chastity Belt – Lydia
Psychic Love – Nancy
Calexico – Bullets & Rocks
The Staves – Make It Holy
Adult Dude – Bonehead
John Grant – Down Here
Palm – Ankles
Luke Top – On the Shore
Eleanor Friedberger – He Didn’t Mention His Mother
Stone Cold Fox – Contagion
Historian – Pulled Under
The Coathangers – Watch Your Back
Jaala – Salt Shaker
The Spook School – I Want To Kiss You
Angel Snow – I Need You
Julia Brown – Snow Day
The Libertines – You’re My Waterloo
Long Beard – Turkeys
The Gooch Palms – Tiny Insight
Roger Harvey – City Deer
Gun Outfit – In Orbit
Great Grandpa – Mostly Here