Tough Customer // Wire

Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band

MSHVB spread

As far as popular art forms go, I have to say music videos are one of my favorites. There’s something about an epic drum fill synced to jump cut footage of the band partying back stage. Or a 12 minute mini-opera about zombies and interstellar space travel set to a soporific Moog solo. It just fascinates me. Needless to say, when MTV came online back in the 80s I was one happy kindergartner. As soon as my family could afford cable, I started watching videos like it was my religion.

Of course, we’ve come a long way since the halcyon days of music television. At first it was all champagne and smoke machines, as major labels threw cash at video directors, hoping they would create the next “Hungry Like The Wolf.” The 80s were all about excess, so the idea of spending $250,000 on a video that showed what a hair metal band looks like after they spend $235,000 on neon spandex and cocaine seemed perfectly in line with the times. Soon enough though, grunge came along and the expensive videos got really serious and self-important and, ultimately, ridiculous. Things kind of reached their nadir when Beavis & Butthead become the most astute critics of the medium.

Not coincidentally, this was right around the time MTV started getting out of the music video business. Adhering to the old saying “if it ain’t broke, replace it with a reality show” MTV moved into lifestyle branding, effectively leaving music videos without a real home on television. A few imitators appeared, haunting the high end of the cable channel guide, but none of them had the juice that MTV did. Plenty of people started questioning whether or not music videos were even a relevant, worthwhile thing for a band or record label to spend their money on.

But then, like so many times before, the world wide internet came along to save the day. During the first bubble internet era, a lot of bands seemed stuck in their old ways; making videos filled with stacks of cash and rented Bentleys and showing a flagrant disregard for creativity and economy of scale. Fortunately for us video lovers, OK GO came along and helped us turn the corner with nothing more than a goofball dance routine and half a dozen tread mills. Now, thanks to better technology and the DIY ethos of YouTube, bands are once again making intriguing, creative videos for music lovers and bored office workers the world over.

In some cases, the videos don’t even contain much, if any of the band’s music. TV On The Radio did a string of hysterical videos to promote Return To Cookie Mountain that mostly featured street noises and off-kilter acting. Tapes ‘n’ Tapes tapped the comic genius of Aziz Ansari to make a mockumentary about a fictional indie music marketing guru named Clell Tickle. And now Mount St. Helens Vietnam Band, a Seattle group with a name doomed to a lifetime of abbreviation, looks to inherit the awesome semi-music related video throne with a series of low rent infomercials that border on perfect (which you can watch here, here, and here).

Best of all, MSHVB do more than make quirky videos. They also play distorted, tempo shifting indie rock that packs an equal amount of brains and balls into every song. Which is like having sex with a beautiful girl and then finding 20 bucks in your pocket when you put your pants back on. And as if that weren’t enough, the line-up of MSHVB offers a story that will only add to their legend. The band is fronted by a young husband and wife team who adopted the teenage drummer as their son. Rumor has it that they formed MSHVB as a gift to him for learning to play the drums so quickly. How cool is that? Seriously, somebody ought to write a book - or at least make a video.

MP3: ‘Albatross, Albatross, Albatross’

MP3: ‘Anchors Dropped’