Tom Milsom Analysis

• Tom Milsom is a 24-year-old musician, producer artist and writer based in London.
• A devoted online following has developed around his music and videos, attracting over fourteen million views and over a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube
• His first five records under the ‘Explorers’ moniker were all created and released in 2010.
• He has previously released two full-length albums, 2007′s Awkward Ballads For The Easily Pleased, and 2009′s Painfully Mainstream.

 

 

BIOGRAPHY

 

"Tom Milsom is a 24 year old multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, comic book artist and videographer. He received piano tuition from an early age, but only began to write music at 17 when he started to take an interest in music production. Later that year, 2007, he recorded his first album ‘Awkward Ballads For The Easily Pleased’, coinciding with the first home-made videos he would upload to the internet. He soon developed a small following, and Awkward Ballads was self-released in a limited run of 50 hand-illustrated copies which ultimately funded the mastering and replication of the final version which continues to sell well. After a year of small gigs and sonic experimentation through discovery of artists like Deerhoof, The Decemberists and Dan Deacon, Tom went into the studio to record his second album ‘Painfully Mainstream’, released on DFTBA Records in 2009. His online following had grown alongside his songwriting ability, and the album develop a devoted audience of thousands." (source: tommilsom.com 2010)

 

“Tom Milsom rocks the streets, the city parks, YouTube, the world-wide intrawebs, the tube stations and, if you asked, he’d probably come to your house and rock your living room. It’s hard to write funny songs that are not moronic and then to deliver them with conviction. Tom Milsom is one of the few who can do it.” —Dave Dederer, founding guitarist and singer, The Presidents of the United States of America.

 

“Tom Milsom is one of the best songwriters of his generation. His songs are as smart as they are catchy.” - John Green, New York Times best-selling author of Paper Towns & The Fault In Our Stars

 

“Tom Milsom, is unfairly talented and young and we hate him for that, but we’ll probably buy his album for those exact same reasons.” — Tom Phillips, London Metro

 

Bare Pale vs Tom Milsom

As we have permission to use the work of both Bare Pale and Tom Milsom, we have to decide which of these artists to use for our final product. The two artists are quite similar in style of music, as both create songs with many layers which leaves lots of space for a versatile music video. The main deciding factor is that while we currently have more ideas for Bare Pale's music, Tom Milsom's songs are of a higher sound quality.

Initial Video Ideas - Bare Pale

Bare Pale are a three-part indie lo-fi band from London. Their music sounds like a combination of Sonic Youth, Pavement & Yuck: discordant, harmonious shoegazing noise rock. The layers in the song could make an interesting multi-layered video, using psychedelic effects and fractal imagery. `` 

The Eight Categories of Music Videos

There are eight categories that almost all music videos fall into:

• Performance
• Concept
• Story
• Gag
• Dance
• Animation
• Party or club
• Film clip

Performance

As the name suggests, performance videos feature the artist or band performing, and often take place in various locations with the performers wearing different outfits in each shot.

Concept

The artist or band neither perform, nor many times, appear in concept videos. These videos portray only stories or images, never performances.

Story

A story video features a narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end, which is intercut with footage or the artist or band performing. The artist may or may not be a character in the story.

Gag

A gag video relies on visual tricks. They can be shot live, also known as executing the visual effects 'in camera,' such as using dolls that look like the band for the performance rather than using the band itself, or using special prostetics to visually alter the artist or lead actor in the videos. Alternatively, the visual tricks can be postproduction effects, such as giving the artist or lead actor an unrealistically long tongue, or setting the video in a location impossible to real life, such as outer space.

Dance

As the name describes, a dance video features choreographed dancing.

Animation

An animation video features animated images, in which the artist and band may be depicted.

Party or club

A party or club video features scenes that take place in a dance club or at a party.

Film Clip

A film-clip video is used when a song is features in a movie soundtrack. This video will contain clips from the film that are intercut with the music video.

From 'Making Music Videos' by Lara M. Schwartz

Initial Video Ideas - Tom Milsom

Tom Milsom is a 23 year old independent musician, Youtuber, producer & artist from London. He has released 14 albums & EPs over the course of 6 years, and is talented in a wide range of instruments. He has described his style of music as 'psychedelic indie pop', although his albums cover a range of genres, including pop, rock, classical & electronic. As he is one of the artists whose music we have consent to work with, we are focusing on forming ideas for a video of one of his songs. Though we may not use his music for our final product, creating a prototype video with the possibility of using it for the final video is important for developing our skills for the end result.

We have been focusing mainly on his most recent song, Take Me Out. The lyrics contain a lot of imagery which helps us form concepts for the video, unlike another song of his, Pipes, which we also considered for our music video but we decided is too abstract in  lyrical content.

Anthem For The Year 2000 by Silverchair analysis

Inspiration

Yuck - The Base of a Dream is Empty

This video has a very hand-made ameteur-ish style, and suits the song well. It features stop-motion as well as vintage looking family home movies, with no performance, and repetition of clips.

Blind Melon - No Rain

The video for this song shows the band performing in a field, interspersed with clips of a girl dressed in a bee outfit dancing. The technicolor effect of the video as well as the way the band look reflects the content and style of the song.

Sum 41 - The Hell Song

This video features dolls performing instead of the artists, with the band's hands intentionally in shot, controlling the dolls. This is a good style of video as it can be adjusted to suit any genre of song.

The Arctic Monkeys - Cornerstone

After The Arctic Monkeys created a video for Crying Lightning, in 2009, the remaining money left for creating this video was $4. The video was directed by British comedian and director Richard Ayoade, who also directed other videos for The Arctic Monkeys. This video shows frontman Alex Turner singing into a tape recorder in a white room, and dancing in an awkward but self-aware manner. There are no edits or changes in the scenery throughout the video until the end when the lighting suddenly becomes sepia-toned and Turner walks out of shot. The other members of the band are not present. This video is similar to the Pixies' video for their song Velouria, which also has no editing and is very simple in style.

Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana - further analysis

                                                 

This video is full of imagery with underlying significance. For example, most of the video takes place in a field of poppies growing next to dead trees, which reflects the contradictory quality of the song. The juxtaposition of life and death is perpetuated throughout the video, another example being the foetus in the hospital room IV, being fed into a dying old man. The poppy field is also reminiscent of the spilled blood of soldiers in war, as well as heroin, which is obtained from opium poppies, apposing heroism, strength and stoicism with heroin, weakness, addiction, and reliance. Sacrifice is also a running theme throughout: the man in a Santa hat crucifies himself, combining the traditional aspects of religion with the stark and harsh reality of Jesus dying on the cross to save sinners. The cross is ridden with crows, a well-known symbol of death, and one of the characters, a little girl dressed in an outfit similar to a bishop or a KKK member, is seen throwing flowers at the base of the cross, as a mourner would at a funeral as a tribute to the dead. A cross is also seen painted on the floor of the gloomy hospital room that the video opens and closes to, carrying the theme of religion throughout the whole video. The foetuses that can be seen hanging from trees and inside the drip in the hospital setting are significant as this video was made shortly after the birth of Cobain's first child, who was the focus of Kurt and Courtney's battle with the media, after it was falsely reported that the baby, Frances Bean Cobain, was born a heroin addict, and was subsequently taken from her parents during the first few weeks of her life.

 

This song was written by Kurt as a tribute to his wife, Courtney Love. It was written in 1993 shortly after the birth of their first child, Frances Bean Cobain. It was originally named 'Heart Shaped Coffin'. It is named after the heart-shaped trinket boxes Courtney sent Kurt after they met but before their relationship started. The lyrics combine violent imagery, nonsensical phrases, and more poetic references to angels, flowers, and babies, creating a song that, while appearing contradictory, are very personal and elegiac.

This video demonstrates fairly simple editing skills as there are no particularly complicated transitions between shots and no editing techniques used within the shots to allow them to look visually more interesting. This puts emphasis on the mise-en-scene, the most important factor in this video aside from the performance and music. In the shots where the band are performing, Cobain is extremely close to the camera looking crazed, and this out-of-focus extreme close-up effect was used in other bands' music videos from this point onwards, for example Soul Asylum's music video for their song Misery (1995). The frontman, Dave Pirner, has adopted Cobain's hair, clothing style, and style of performance in this video, although the song is vastly different from Nirvana's music. The screenshots below are excerpts from the Soul Asylum video showing the parallels between this and the Heart Shaped Box video.

Indie/rock music video analyses

I chose three different music videos which I thought represented the genres of indie and rock all accurately but in different ways. 

The video for Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana is an example of a 'grunge' rock video. Grunge is a combination of hard rock, punk rock, and heavy metal. This video was written by Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, and directed by dutch photographer and director Anton Corbijn, who has also directed music videos for Joy Division, Metallica, Echo & the Bunnymen, and Depeche Mode, as well as directing films such as Control (2007), the biopic of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis's life, and photographing many musicians, which shows his involvement with the popular music industry. Despite being a professional music video director, Corbijn decided to let Cobain take over with the concept of the video, as he had already meticulously conceptualised and documented his ideas. The video is highly colorised, contrasting the darkness of the song. The video involves religious imagery & references to drug addiction, all of which are based in a surreal dreamworld. The camerawork involves many out-of-focus extreme closeups of the singer and less shots of the rest of the band, which puts the emphasis and attention almost wholly on Cobain. The video follows no clear story but the narrative shifts from three central characters, a girl, a crucified man in a santa hat, and a woman painted as a human anatomy model, and is interspersed with shots of the band.

In 1990, American rock band Pixies were offered an opportunity to play their song Velouria on Top of The Pops, but as a rule at the time, only songs with videos were allowed to appear on the show. The band had no interest in shooting a professional video and so while on tour in Manchester, filmed a 23-second clip of themselves running towards the camera over rocks in a quarry, and then slowed it down to fit the length of the song. The video has no cuts or editing at all other than having been slowed down. It has often been described as an 'anti-video', and in the context of this punk angst-driven band is extremely effective in creating an ironic & humourous contrast to the high-budget, meticulously crafted pop music videos of the time. 

Visual artist & indie alternative musician Tom Milsom created the video for his song Take Me Out using a combination of disorienting split-screen found vintage footage interspersed with clips of himself singing & dancing with psychedelic kaleidoscopic overlays. The video often progresses in time with the beat of the song, and although the clips used have little relevance to the content of the song, the result is a combination of sound & visual art working harmoniously.

Genre analysis - indie rock

Indie rock is a sub-genre of alternative music which originated in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. The name of this genre is interchangeable with 'alternative rock', as 'indie rock' was initially used to describe a band's record label. The genre is very diverse, including lo-fi, indie pop, college rock & jangle pop. The UK indie rock scene is one of the most prevalent in modern music: successful indie rock artists include The Arctic Monkeys, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Oasis, and Belle & Sebastian, all of which are also popular outside of the UK. Indie rock has developed a cult following of the younger generation and sparked a fashion movement, often argued to be the result those striving to be different or more 'underground' than pop music followers. Indie rock draws inspiration from popular bands such as The Beatles, The Velvet Underground and Radiohead, and the result is a combination of britpunk, rock & roll, experimental and folk.

Oasis

The Jesus & Mary Chain

Blog Introduction

Over the next year in A2 Media we are focusing on music videos with an aim to eventually draw from our research and original ideas and create our own. This blog will document the process as it develops.