British trip-hopper FKA Twigs (née Tahliah Debrett Barnett) has a new, 5-song EP catchily titled M3LL155X, which is garnering respectable if not rhapsodic reviews. The title, by the way, is pronounced “Melissa.” Duh. It’s the name of the Twigs’ alter ego. Or maybe not. It’s complicated. In any event, to promote the freshly-released EP, the singer-songwriter has released an elaborately trippy, 16-minute promotional video on her personal YouTube channel.
The short film contains visualizations of four of the EP’s five songs: “Figure 8,” “I’m Your Doll,” “In Time,” and “Glass & Patron.” Only “Mothercreep” failed to make the cut. The music is, at its core, mildly experimental and adventurous dance pop, delivered in rather distant and almost robotic manner. The lyrical content (“Wind me up, I’m a doll / Dress me up, I’m a doll”), meanwhile, hearkens back to Live Through This-era Courtney Love. Where the M3LL155X promo really shines is in its calculatedly berserk visuals, which include Twigs herself as a creepy, sentient sex doll with an inflatable body and a human head. Also, she gives birth to paint at one point.
Comparisons to the films of David Lynch are obvious and unavoidable, which is why people are already making them. Lots of Lynchian motifs are here: flickering lights, lingering closeups of people’s faces, old people. The film which is most vividly evoked in the video is Eraserhead, with its similar themes of procreation and birth. There is one moment in FKA Twigs’ video in particular (it happens at about the 3:17 mark) which seems cribbed directly from the opening sequence of Eraserhead. But there’s a lot of typical music video stuff going on here, too, like people dancing in front of a black background in some nameless, formless void somewhere. All in all, it’s a satisfyingly surreal way to spend a quarter of an hour.
[via Metafilter]