Watch: 10 Best Music Videos of 2014

WATCH LIVE EYE TV’s 10 FAVORITE VIDEOS OF 2014:
1. Thug Entrancer “Death After Life I“:
Our vote for the Best Music Video of the Year goes to the mult-media artist Milton Melvin Croissant III, for his outstanding work on Thug Entrancer‘s “Death After Life I“. Using computer generated graphics and a wickedly surreal wit, Croissant’s unforgettable imagery casts urban life as a vast, empty maze of skyscrapers, and their air-conditioned interiors. Seemingly devoid of human life, bizarre evidence of our modern existence still lies about under plastic, flickering on dying screens, or working aimlessly thru the night carving tattoos on robot arms! When we find out later that a little pointy eared imp lords over this virtual dream from high atop his DJ tower, somehow it all seems to make sense. “Death After Life I” can be found on Thug Entrancer’s Death After Life LP, out this year on the Daniel Lopatin curated label, Software Recording Co.

2. Shabazz Palaces “#CAKE“:
Japanese video artist Hiro Murai directs the Shabazz Palaces track “#CAKE“, off the duo’s phenomenal 2014 LP Lese Majesty, out now on Sub Pop. Murai’s trademark use of human figures and objects that are out of scale with their environment achieves breathtaking ends in this video. The action open on a night scene, with a man running down the street as though he’s being chased, and a well-placed long shot, with it’s tall perspective, is our first intimation that something larger might be afoot. A huge spinning crown in a crumbling cathedral, lamppost-sized arms hanging over the city streets, and other visual oddities further skew our sense of dimension, but the real surprise comes when a giant, naked female form is found reclining in the streets, dwarfing even the cars and buildings around her!

3. Holly Herndon “Chorus”
Earlier this year, Holly Herndon confessed she had been “spying” on the Japanese visual artist Akihiko Taniguchi for some time, so he was a natural candidate when it came time to choose someone to direct the video for her track, “Chorus“. Sonically, the track is constructed out of audio snippets recorded during her visits to Skype, YouTube, etc., a process she described as, “spying on my own online habits”. Taniguchi followed suit by inviting his friends to send photos of their own computers and work spaces. Then, using custom built 3D software to record strange trips into these intimate environments, he captured a slew of heavily processed, bit-glitched imagery that composes our familiar, everyday forms into something far more bizarre and dislocating. You can find the track “Chorus” on Holly Herndon’s 2014 12″, out now on RVNG Intl.

4. Panda Bear “Mr. Noah”
The lysergic visuals for Panda Bear‘s “Mr. Noah” video are provided by the acting/directing team AB/CD/CD. Centered around an apartment complex courtyard, and an apparent argument between two lovers, the video’s constantly rotating perspective, looped edits, and amazing camera flights, are sure to disorient in the best of ways! The video also assembles quite the cast of characters, intercutting their various viewpoints through repeated, mirroring snippets of action that create an Escher-like helix out of the visual space. Contributing to the chaos, difficult camera flights link the action on the ground floor courtyard, (a dumped lover watches his suitcase and personal items raining down from above), with that on an upper floor of the building, where his angry girlfriend can be seen hurling the goods out of her apartment window. Look for this track on Panda Bear’s Mr. Noah EP, produced by Spacemen 3’s Peter “Sonic Boom” Kember, and out now on Domino.

5. Lusine “Arterial”
Seattle electronic music producer Lusine pairs with the amazing stop motion animator and graphic designer Christophe Thockler, in this stellar video for the track “Arterial“. The French artist uses stunningly realized close-ups and macro images of some mysterious, jerry-rigged motherboard, and making it ooze with a blood-like substance, we watch until the gear bubbles and melts under the liquid’s corrosive effects. Thockler captures excellent detail on the tubes and micro-components of this odd machine, combining low light conditions with pulses of shifting illumination that echo the track’s shuffling, syncopated beats. Thockler says that he used, “15kg of components from televisions and computers, 5 liters of blood, 7000 photos and not less than 30 minutes of filmed plans.” He also claims to have “slipped winks in small tributes” to directors and films like, “Tetsuo Shinya Tsukamoto, Coppola’s Dracula…Cronenberg’s Videodrome“, and more. Lusine’s Arterial EP is out now on Ghostly International.

6. clipping. “Work Work”
The LA rap trio clipping. turned out a number of striking videos for their 2014 LP release CLPPNG, out now on Sub Pop, but “Work Work” took the cake! Director Carlos Lopez Estrada combines technical brilliance with a wicked sense of humor in this video, which features the group’s vocalist Daveed Diggs rapping from a most compromised position. Lying flat on the ground with his mouth open over a parking median, while fellow vocalist on the track, Cocc Pistol Cree, rests her boot on his head, waiting to deliver a skull shattering New Jersey necktie, Diggs is quite the sight as spits out the track’s tangled street tale. Estrada chooses to capture the scene with a single tracking shot, ultimately adding to the video’s suspense as the camera pans around Ninja-like to deliver a multitude of vantages on this comically doomed vignette.

7. Xiu Xiu “Cinthya’s Unisex”
Xiu Xiu‘s Jamie Stewart has a real knack for plumbing the depths of desire and alienation in his music, and his 2014 LP Angel Guts: Red Classroom, out now on Polyvinyl, is no exception. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that several of the videos he turned in this year from the record were not quite safe for work viewing, as they say. “Cinthya’s Unisex” skirts that line, but it’s disturbing imagery is both visually beautiful, in it’s way, and metaphorically meaningful. Created by the French graphic designer Florent Texier, the video uses children’s drawings, in conjunction with the track’s erotically charged lyrical content, which is displayed as text beneath the illustrations as though narrating the pages of a kids book. Animating violent explosions of crayon-like color over these innocent images, Texier’s expressionistic and defacing style is an excellent vehicle for depicting this track’s challenging emotional terrain.

8. Death Grips “Inanimate Sensation”
We sure will miss Death Grips singular approach to video making, like delivering a cutting edge video for all eleven tracks on their 2013 LP Government Plates. “Inanimate Sensation” features a wrecked jumbo tron, crashed onto an empty stadium basketball court, and it brilliantly provides the video’s second screen on which we watch MC Ride spit his virulent non sequiturs. Meanwhile, a psychedelic maelstrom of colors and bizarre imagery rapidly inter-cut, providing a visual whiplash in keeping with Ride’s verbal beatdown.

9. A Place To Bury Strangers “Straight”
A Place To Bury Strangers will release their Transfixiation LP this coming February via Dead Oceans, but to close out 2014’s hectic visual schedule, the band delivered this searing video for their track, “Straight“. Directed by Brook Linder, the video uses a glitched, VHS look to quite unsettling ends. Opening with a hand-held long shot of a smoggy urban skyscape, shot from high up on a distant hill, with APTBS providing an imposing subterranean rumble just beneath the sonic surface, we watch in astonishment as the distant buildings shake loose from their moorings and grow upwards like menacing, dark towers. This image, like something straight out of a nightmare, is followed by a wild barrage of color-burned footage that includes all kinds of psychotronic creepiness, complete with animating occult sigils, and vocalist Oliver Ackermann‘s neon colored profile singing in relief.

10. Pissed Jeans “Boring Girls”
This year Pissed Jeans reissued their 2005 debut LP Shallow, out now via Sub Pop. For the re-buffed version of “Boring Girls“, director Joe Stakun returned to deliver another hilarious episode of repressed suburban angst. Clay Tatum and Laura Simpson star in this bad (means good) sit-com inspired narrative that features canned laughter, cheesy stage sets, and cheap special effects! Tatum’s got only one kinda gal on his mind, but when his date with this favorite “boring girl” goes seriously awry, he’s sucked down his own retarded vortex of love–complete with dancing ladies that spew spaghetti, and other misadventures you won’t wanna miss!