British post-punk vets Gang of Four this week dropped the third music video from their new album Content: a glitchy, revved-up collage of effects and images set to “Who Am I,” the third single off the current record. The new video was filmed in London this summer and directed by bandmember Andy Gill.
On Gang of Four’s website, Gill writes:
“We made a couple of performance videos in January, for ‘Never Pay For the Farm’ and ‘It Was Never Gonna Turn Out Too Good’ and we strongly felt that this time we wanted to create something that was an artifact in itself rather than a recording of an event, something with a strong identity. There were two ideas to begin with. One was to have images that were fractured into many misaligned mini images, which in a way parallels the lyrical idea of ’Who Am I?,’ and the other was to create a narrative history loosely based on the characters in the song — pilgrim fathers, gamblers, cripples and dead men. As we worked on it, it became obvious that the graphic aspect of the image on the screen would become paramount.”
PREVIOUSLY ON SLICING UP EYEBALLS
- Video: Gang of Four, ‘It Was Never Gonna Turn Out Too Good,’ off 2011′s ‘Content’
- Video: Watch Gang of Four’s 40-minute live set recorded for KCRW
- Video: Gang of Four plays ‘Never Pay for the Farm’ on Letterman
- Video: Gang of Four, ‘Never Pay for the Farm’
- Download free Gang of Four EP, featuring new version of ‘Glass’
- Gang of Four sets 13-date North American tour in February supporting ‘Content’
- Download: Gang of Four’s ‘Never Pay for the Farm,’ off forthcoming ‘Content’
- Gang of Four releasing ‘Content’ in January with vials of band members’ blood
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1 Comments
It’s brilliant! Both Andy and John look like denture-less grandfathers barking “Get off my lawn, you godd***ed f***in’ brats!” at local teens who are simply walking down the pavement. The “new” album is currently #25,000 or on the Amazon sales list, which means it is selling about three copies a month, and in two-thirds of a year, it’s only received 8 reviews. How the mighty have fallen! Why are they even bothering with another video? You could almost respect them making another disco album – at least that would show gumption and perseverance, and it might lead one to think that they didn’t make “Hard” (et al) for any other reason than an odd personal aesthetic. But this return to the brittle angry early sound fails utterly. They have no ideas, the new rhythm section is nothing on Dave and Hugo, and they don’t even steal from *themselves* very imaginatively!
I do love their corporate double-speak about “artifact” and “event” and “misaligned mini images.” For guys who throw around that kind of gibberish with straight faces, you’d think they would have had a better sense of the marketplace regarding their own iconography at least one demonstrable time since 1982.
Ha.