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This week in music videos brings us some great experimentation. King's Parade and Networks came in with two of our favorite animated videos in a long time, while Nero and Of Monsters and Men tell a pair of unexpected love stories. There's some totally screwed up stuff, too. Autre Ne Veut and Leftfield & Sleaford Mods do a pretty good job freaking us out with visuals that are alternately terrifying and gross—and we love a good stomach turner! If you want some extra material after you digest the greatest hits below, Monster Monster's video for "Assassin" is a noir-ish visual feast, and Vangoffey's "Race of Life" is a wonderfully unexpected approach to explaining the biological processes of insemination, conception, and birth. Bet you didn't expect that!
It's amazing how disgusting this starts to feel when the medium shifts from hand-drawn cartoons to claymation. It's like you can start to smell and feel the visuals and it's very satisfyingly grotesque. By the time it gets to CGI it’s basically toxic Pac-Man.
This beautiful 3D paper animation is the result of six months of work. Everything our paper protagonist touches turns to paper letters that crumble into piles. It's a strangely powerful dramatic narrative, but we won't spoil the ending for you! Praise puppet-maker and director Lilly Fang for the beautiful images.
If Hayao Miyazaki remade FernGully as a Pixar movie, would it look like this?
When TV static comes to life and is hunted by men with canons!
This is truly one of the most troubling things we've seen in a long time.
When Paul Thomas Anderson isn't directing nearly impossible to adapt projects like Inherent Vice, he just skips around New York City and directs music videos!
Dancing kids, right? Us too. This is like Stomp the Yard for three minutes and it’s wonderful.
Anyone who would be enticed by a boom box with faces popping out of the speakers is probably hallucinating this entire evening, because they're clearly crazy. So, watch this clearly crazy nerd's dreams come true thanks to boom box with faces growing out of it.
Of Monsters and Men have turned in some lush videos in the past, so this beautiful black and white love story feels right in line with their rich, surprising aesthetic. Erika Linder plays the young beauty in "Empire" and Ingmari Lamy plays her equally beautiful, if significantly older, paramour. Watch their story unfold over this beautiful few minutes.
Finally! The untold story of Clippy the Microsoft Office assistant! You got a bum deal, Clippy. You deserved better. Take your vengeance!
The sound of "You Tell Em" is industrial and tribal and the look is high-fashion dystopia. This one came out a couple of months ago, but it was weird and pretty enough for us to throw it in here as a bonus track. Zebra Katz is coming at you hard.
