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Drew Johnson rides a horse into the night in this Game of Thrones-ish video.
Crazy Chief, "Angel Dust"
A warlock-themed video might seem more apt for doom metal, but this Denis Bosnjakovic-directed Game of Thrones-ish mini-epic works so well for Crazy Chief, it won the Downtown Project-sponsored Music Lab video contest at this year’s Las Vegas Film Festival. The heavy rockers’ Sabbath-y guitar hooks and the song’s scathing, stuck-in-your-head chorus—“Wizards, warlocks, angel dust!”—already make for a badass song. Add in the video’s druid-like figures, horseback riding and naked woman atop a pentagram of stones, and it goes way, way over the top, in the best way possible.
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Jackson Wilcox sings during "Her Radiating Heart."
A Crowd of Small Adventures, "Her Radiating Heart"
The indie quintet couldn’t have picked a more breathtaking spot (Big Bear Lake) to film its latest video, directed by Tom Hinueber and filmed by Logan Stewart (also for the LVFF’s Music Lab). The onscreen love story, between an alluring, curly-haired brunette and her beau, isn’t quite as clear-cut as the song’s bleating lyrics—“Though I will love her always … the light and the hope that we shared are gone”—but the mini-film does serve as a beautiful canvas, encouraging us to focus on joyful memories rather than severed ties of the past.
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Think of it as a three-minute episode of Portlandia.
The Quitters, "Hipster"
The most overused word in the English language has come to describe not just American Apparel employees and bartenders with handlebar mustaches, but everyone in between. “Hipster” is a pop-punk ode to the dudes who don’t fit in and are all the happier for it. The Quitters employed Ryan Reason of Square Shooting for the video, which follows a plain ol’ Joe on an ordinary day, as he walks in—and immediately out—of a folk show, strolls past a bacon-infused lemonade stand and almost gets run over by a stampede of fixed-gear cyclists. Think of it as a three-minute episode of Portlandia.
