Various Artists: No Parachute Vol. 1: A Collection of Indie Rock Videos [DVD]

The music video has the potential to be one of the most powerful forms of art ever created. A perfect marriage between imagery and sound, let loose from the boundaries of narrative, a music video has the potential to have profound emotional effects, a modern equivalent of similar minded, but more highbrow, art forms such as ballet and opera. The first popular movie that incorporated sound, The Jazz Singer, used it as an excuse for a few musical set pieces. Even some of the most well-respected movie makers today, from Quentin Tarantino to Wes Anderson, have inadvertently created what amount to powerful music videos within their greatest movies (has anybody ever listened to Steelers Wheel in the same way again?). Of course, for the most part, music videos fail to be anything more than disposable advertisements for popular artists or time capsule snap-shots of unfortunate pop culture trends. That’s why when I heard about a collection of indie rock bands creating videos simply for the sake of creating videos, I was intrigued. Unfortunately, the result, No Parachute, which heralds itself as “the rebirth of the indie music video”, more often than not reveals a lack of visual creativity for most of the artists and directors involved.

It should be noted, before I address some of the flaws of these videos, that none of these bands are working with much of a budget, so it’s difficult to blame them if none of these videos contains mind-blowing special effects or surprise celebrity cameos. It’s a credit to all the bands and directors involved that none of the videos are really handicapped by this lack of money, even when filmed with what is obviously a standard home video camera. In each case, it seems that the director’s vision has been adequately represented. However, the main flaw with many of these videos lies with the fact that these videos are often created on flimsy, one-note ideas which lack visual appeal.

In dealing with the problem of a lack of money, it seems too many bands came up with two similar solutions. The first and most popular solution is for the director to film deliberately grainy footage of just about anything he or she comes across within a period of time, and then attempt to edit the footage together in a way that masks the fact that there is no coherent idea behind the video. Images filmed inside a moving video are apparently a real premium to some of these filmmakers, whether they are cityscapes or, especially, nondescript forests. The idea, from what I gather, is that the deliberately grainy footage of nothing much special is a reflection of the bare bones D.I.Y. spirit and the lack of footage of the band playing is a testimony to the ego-less world of indie rock. However, it is still boring, and it is made even duller by the fact that this approach counts for about a third of the videos in this compilation (of them, only the Trembling Blue Stars’ “Helen Reddy” is a strong enough song to make the video effective).

The second solution, which is a little bit less monotonous, relies on the use of relatively inexpensive animation (standard or stop motion). More often than not, the results are too twee and art-school-y to be interesting. (The teddy bear robbery of the Maybellines’ “Wait for You” is a particularly odious example.) A few examples, however, work very well. Architecture in Helsinki’s “Like a Call” tells an oblique tale of a brother and sister who borrow their father’s car in order to beautifully dive off a cliff, an act that either represents pure freedom or suicide. Le Mans’s “Cancion de todo va mal” uses simple geometric shapes bouncing in response to the band’s subtle bossa nova, creating a mesmerizing swaying video with the barest of materials. However, most of the other animated videos play like the artist has outsourced the video job to a disinterested art school graduate given barely a few hours to come up with a concept.

Suffice it to say that most of the videos on No Parachute are forgettable exercises in the music video form that do little to enhance the songs that they go with. Rather than impugn the artists by listing a roll call of some of the worst videos, which would be rather unfair to the mostly innocent musicians (my apologies to the Maybellines), I will just list a few gems buried among the filler. For starters, Palomar breaks away from its peers by engaging in humor for the video for “Albacore”, which showcases the band’s attempts to find a drummer, including an amusing audition sequence full of clueless amateurs. Even though I’m not a fan of the song itself, singer-songwriter Nixon’s video for “Snow Day” shows how effective camera angles can turn a mundane concept (singer lip-synchs to his song while traveling through a snow-covered city) into a worthy short film. Finally Boyracer barrels through three of its songs to a montage of just slightly off home movies apparently set in a desert landscape in a video that seems mundane but is somewhat puzzling none-the-less. In these videos, the songs and imagery combine into something greater than its parts, the ideal of every music video. It’s a shame that it happens rarely on No Parachute.