Along with their new album The Great Pretenders Los Angeles band Mini Mansions released an incredible visual today for their song “Vertigo” featuring Arctic Monkeys’ lead singer Alex Turner. The video opens up with a dizzying sequence of events that is akin to the opening of twilight zone meeting the trip from hell.
The nightmare like opening leads into the visual of a lady picking up a phone. She looks terrified as if someone was following her, and then through the natural unraveling of the plot a mysterious guy with a mannequin face donned in an all black attire consisting of a trench coat and fedora appears. The motif of an object and an obsessor is continued through a more practical situation. A photographer is seen taking pictures of a female model wearing only the bottoms to a lingerie set. I forgot to mention this video is pretty NSFW. Collectable items such as statues and figurines are then displayed on a white or black backdrop replacing the aesthetic of a living object. But where this becomes what prevents this from being just a normal guy taking a photo of a normal girl, or any object, is that the next photographer seen is wearing a yellow poncho with a face that looks like it is made out of porcelain and blasted with make up. The director of this video is suggesting that we as individuals become the things we obsess over.
The first performance shot, and subsequently the second verse belongs to Alex Turner. He is dressed up in a nice three piece suit and comes off looking like a spy, and he exudes a charm as he sings his part. Throughout Turner’s verse a man is seen struggling with two guards with convex mirror masks, a woman’s fingers holding a cigarette is seen protruding through blood, and dark wizard creature is blowing out candles and feeding girls pizza. And if that isn’t a selling point on why this visual is probably the craziest thing you will see all day Zach Dawes is seen standing at the helm with a half dozen naked girls with clown noses admiring him. The complexity of the visuals eventually end up pointing to the central idea of every object in the video in one way or another having an obsessor.
Shuman the bassist of Mini Mansions, and also Queens of the Stone Age spoke on the making of the “Vertigo” video with Alex Turner.
“The night before the shoot we played this strange private party for Saint Laurent with Bleached and Sky Ferreira, where we each played 15 minute sets. So there was plenty of time for debauchery afterward. Us and Alex managed to stumble onto set for the shoot at 9am with a half dozen naked ladies waiting to partake in the shoot. I’d say it was a pretty ideal setup for the making of this video.”
Mini Mansions will be going on tour in promotion of their album “The Great Pretenders” for majority of 2015. Hopefully the rest of their visuals to come off of the album are as mind-stimulating as this. Watch Mini Mansions “Vertigo” featuring Alex Turner above.
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