Reel Dealer

Two Blue

New Videos From Blue Man and Pleasure Beach

Words: Sandy Hunter

Two recent music video projects, Blue Man Group's "Sing Along" and Pleasure Beach's "Out of the Blues," attempt to fuse two sometimes-contrary cultural forces -- pop and art -- into the music video format.

The Blue Man Group, a trio of performance artists who achieve clone-like similarity via identical clothing and blue painted skin, rose to notoriety during the high tech heyday of the late-90s, taking their sight and sound show from New York to Vegas. Soon enough, they found their way into a TV advertising campaign for Intel. Now, with the help of Lava Records, their first album, The Complex, has been released. A host of guests, including Dan The Automator and Dave Matthews, added their signature sounds to the Blue ones' invented orchestra, with results ranging from promisingly ominous to utter wankery.

The video for "Sing Along" (the group's collaboration with Matthews) was directed by none other than David Kellogg, who also happened to capture the trio's antics in the aforementioned computer chip commercials. The video features the three freaky fellows, one performing with a harnessed tube xylophone, one emitting swooshing sounds by sweeping staves through the air and all of them vigorously spazzing out. Matthews appears to, of course, sing along and add a pop touch to the performance. Sadly, the makers of the video felt inclined to link Matthew's unobtrusive performance with basic 3-D animated sequences to highlight the insecurities the singer admits in his lyrics. Why add 3-D graphics to this video when the Men themselves are visually engaging enough as is? The closing of the promo, with red- orange geysers erupting in the simulated cityscape surrounding the performers, covering everyone in lava-like goo, is a more apt visual climax for the "Sing Along."

Much more raw is Pleasure Beach's "Out of the Blues." The band's front man, Art Jones, is a prominent music video editor in London, and in making his band's first indie video, brought onboard no less than 12 hipster directors to shoot 20 seconds each of the band's video. Sam Arthur starts the whole thing off with nicely back-lit performance shots of the band, but things quickly go squirrelly. Barnaby Roper shows a performance clip via stills and a floating skull with Casey Jones overtones; Sam Brown and Paul Gore filmed the band's organ player and Hammond being detonated in an empty pasture; and Mat Kirkby put Jones in the role of an office worker singing his way through an earthquake from beneath his desk. Alex Smith, Andy Hutch, Scott Lyon, Matt Thame, James Frost, Richard Fenwick and Jones himself contributed 20-second snippets to the track (which of course, Jones edited); the segments range from roller-coaster rock outs, to '80s tracksuit gymnastics and shots of sexy women (some of them painted blue and green, others in swimming costumes). The overall effect is disjointed, so much so that those not in the know might well be distracted by the wildly varied images crammed into the time frame of a single rock song. But at the same time, some of the clips are gold and this video stands far from the barrage of rock performance videos being churned out to match the ongoing rock & roll revival.

Check back soon for our take on "Seven Nation Army," the latest video for The White Stripes.