Aerosmith
"Fly Away From Here"


I think to myself, "I'm at college now. I've got plenty of free time. I started my own blog. I really, really, really ought to ACTUALLY WRITE SOMETHING for the one I've been on-staff with for two months now."

So I turn on CMT for inspiration, and what do I find? Joe Perry with angel wings.

Well, shit. That'll do.

The offender: Aerosmith. This particular offense: "Fly Away From Here."

It's a shit video, but not entirely a shit song. There's a reason for this: they stole the opening hook from "Across the Universe." You know, I love "Dream On" as much as the next guy, but that was something like 27 years ago, and really, when you're out of three-chord intros, you know it just might be time to hang up your collagen injected lips.

That's right, Stevey. I'm talking to you. For fans of Mr. Tyler's lips, fear not: you'll get exactly what you're looking for here. Plenty of aching, wailing, soft bridge, more wailing, repeat more wailing, blah, blah, blah. You'll also get the obligatory Aerosmith Hot Video Girl, and she'll be doing futuristic things, too. She's neither a Tyler nor a Silverstone, but she sure can fly a robot. Yes, fly a robot. Aerosmith, video purveyors of girlie camraderie, teenage scientists, abused daughters, and raging guitars have moved on to hangin' with Duo and Treize.

As the video opens, we quickly learn that, in the future, domestic troubles are solved through viscious virtual robot battle. Or maybe it's a way of flirting, or maybe it's just foreplay. Nonetheless, our plucky protagonist and her ornery boyfriend fly into a future world that rapes The Fifth Element for its visual design. As the dull ballad rips on, Aerosmith plays inside a domed studio--no, wait, the dome crashes apart to reveal that they jam not in the mere present, but atop an enchanted future building, around which those very same bubbly Gundamesque mechs fly, shoot, and smash into each other, all fueled by the power of love! Fun future fact: being a girl ensures you the ability to shoot hearts from your robot (in an idea stolen from the videogame Virtual On...for god's sakes, guys, you're millionaires...buy something new), but the trade-off? You must wear a bikini in your virtual cockpit.

Yes, life in the future is rough.

The battle rages on, and in the end, someone wins. Judging by the guy's sad face, it's the girl, but seeing as they're still laying on that car, I'm not sure what he's complaining about. Guys in the heartland in Aerosmith videos always score, so stop whining, you depressed hick.

The visuals are decent, but also highly, highly cheesearific. Enough with the god-damn angel wings already! We don't need close-ups of lips, we don't need close-ups of Joe Perry grinding his guitar, and we don't need close-ups of the beefy bassist! We just need this pain to go away. Video gets a bonus point for the initial break-away reveal of Aerosmith's studio-dome shattering into the future skyway, and, because Aerosmith gets stupider by the day, that's all it gets at all.

reviewed by Paul

Beta Band
"Squares"


You know, I'd gotten tired of the parade of negativity around here. As I idly flipped through the MTV (*FUCK THAT SHIT!* Necessary burst of rebellion now completed) homepage, I searched for a video I could review that would be, y'know, NOT CRAP. "Ah-ha!" I exclaimed. "I'll go for the darlings of the indie-pop set, The Beta Band! They opened for Radiohead! They've never let me down before!" I was not prepared to let the fact that I'd never heard anything by them make that statement sound hollow. So, I gave an optimistic click and fixed my gaze upon "Squares."

And since you're not visually illiterate, and you saw the heading to this review, you can tell I was disappointed.

Really, this video is nothing but an episode of AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HOME VIDEOS with a decent cinematographer. One with a fetish for slow motion, I might add. It's the only way he could dilate the running time of this mediocre premise out to the length of the song, I suppose. Basically, an old man doing housework has a lot of theoretically comical and factually painful mishaps. That's it. That's the whole video. And there are only three mishaps, all clustered in the second half of the video. The first half's all setup. And what gutbusting setup it is.

(Sarcasm reserves depleted. Switching to brutal candor.)

Honestly, you wait a couple of minutes for something to friggin' HAPPEN in the video, and when it does, it's not that funny and is really kind of mean. It's marginally clever, sure -- boy, the sausage gag made me wince -- but the pace is too slow for the gimmick, really, and the gimmick's actually not very good to start with. Shockingly enough, I think America burned out on the comically videotaped pain of others (celebrities not included) a long time ago -- you'll note that we no longer see Bob Saget on our televisions every Sunday at 7 PM. Thank the sweet Lord Jesus Christ, who probably cancelled the show personally, single-handedly atoning for the last 2000 years of human misery.

But I digress.

Beta Band. "Squares." Not so good. Don't bother.

reviewed by Chris Conroy

Linkin Park
"Crawlin" (American Version)


Whoa! Isn't that the guy I just saw in the Drowning Pool video?? And hey, isn't this basically the same video? Oh look! More snarling faces! More anger, more angst, more feeling trapped within your own mind. More mental breakdowns. If that dude with the black hair looks into the camera one more time, I'm going to bitchslap the hardcore right out of him. He looks like the kind of guy you would walk up to and spit on for no apparent reason. Then again, he'd probably spit on you first. And the girl. She looks like an escapee from a Crazy Town video.

Does anyone have anything original to say? Have all the videos been made? Have all the songs been written? Should we have realized years ago when Ice Cube rhymed "jumbo" and "gumbo" that there was nothing left for us to hear anymore? There's certainly nothing new in this video. There's not even anything new in the music. Hell, it took me 5 minutes before I realized this wasn't the other Linkin Park song. Please, someone wake me when rapcore has up and died. Or at least when you are able to tell one video from another.

reviewed by Michele C

Drowning Pool
"Bodies"


(Note: Add one-half star if you think Fred Durst rocks. Which you shouldn't.)

Hi, and welcome back to "You Can Do It!" Thanks to the short attention span of today's youth, making a nu-metal video has never been easier! We have all the supplies right here for you in one tidy package. Our book shows you how to make snarling faces one minute and appear disaffected the next. Our supplies include all the trappings of a mental breakdown; white coats, wrist straps, straight jackets..you name it we got it! Now all you have to do is play 4 or 5 chords, mumble some lyrics about being trapped inside yourself and going crazy, and Bam! You have your very own nu-metal video in the great tradition of Papa Roach and Limp Bizkit. And if you call now, we will throw in enough earrings and tattoos to make you look like you've been hanging out with Biohazard! Act now, supplies are going fast! Come on, don't YOU want to be the next Drowning Pool? How do you think THEY got to be the next Korn?

reviewed by Michele C

Jimmy Eat World
"Bleed American"


There are times when I wish that this wasn't a music video review weblog. Sometimes, I wish we were reviewing the song itself. Because boy, if we were, I would be REAMING THIS MOTHERFUCKER A NEW ASSHOLE RIGHT NOW, holy God in heaven. But as it stands, I've got to confine myself to the video. It's going to take work. And as it stands, I'm probably going to get a volume of hate mail from this that meets or exceeds that which I received for describing Alien Ant Farm's "Movies" as "Merely Adequate." But you know, them's the breaks, kids. You may love ol' Jimmy and his passel of ornery World-Eaters or whatever they're called now, but trust me, this is not going to be one of those things you look back on fondly ten years from now (unless the band suddenly starts writing real songs and proves me wrong). My brother liked Motley Crue, you know. We all know how THAT worked out.

Alright, alright. All of this vitriol is pouring off of me, admittedly, after having seen the video three times in quick succession back-to-back. This was a self-inflicted punishment.

There are few things on this world that bore me more savagely than a straightforward performance video. Actually being at concerts? That's great, I've got tickets to four of 'em in the next month and a half. Best feeling in the world. And I've got dozens and dozens of bootlegged live performances by my favorite bands. Live music is grand. But watching one song from a concert, frantically edited to cover for the fact that it's really just a bunch of guys standing on a stage hitting things? That, my friends, is frequently a complete and utter waste of your time. Hence, we have the video for "Bleed American," which consists entirely of extreme close-ups on guitar necks and a lot of quote-unquote "rocking out," i.e. "stumbling around in a confined area while jerking your instrument around soulfully." BLEAGH. Nobody, but nobody, should make performance videos anymore unless it's going to be an unbelievably great experience to watch it, and nine times out of ten, it won't. This is one of them: All we get is herky-jerky cinematography and a wee bit of spit. Very, very poor indeed.

reviewed by Chris Conroy

New Order
"Crystal"


New Order! Holy shit! They live! I desperately hope that our loveable audience knows who they are, though if not, you should know that they're the folks Orgy covered with "Blue Monday," and that a remix of their song "Confusion" was the trance song they played in BLADE, you know, the one that everyone liked even if the movie sucked. Right then, between that and The All Music Guide you should be up to snuff.

So New Order have their first new album in eight years coming out October 16th, and we all know what that means: a new lead single! "Crystal" is an undeniably great dance-rock tune, and the video's ingenious. You see, the members of New Order are in their forties now. Which makes it a wee bit hard to get good airplay on youth-obsessed MTV (not that New Order will get MTV play anyway -- try MTV2 or CTN closer to the album's release, though). So they just forget about putting themselves in the video and hire a ridiculously youthful band to do it instead. "The Killers" are our musical tour guides through this straightforward performance video -- excepting the fact, of course, that it's not a performance at all -- and then at the end, they have their instruments ripped from them by an angry mob. Clever enough, but I can't help thinking that the last thing you want to do if trying to reintroduce New Order to the world (and a new generation) is hide New Order from the world. But as long as the song is groovy and the video is at least amusing (and it is -- I covet the giant video-wall), then I suppose you've earned yourself three stars from this member of the FUCK MTV! crew. It helps to be old, too. I seem to like old bands.

Thanks to NME.com, you can watch the video here.

reviewed by Chris Conroy