Best Local Music Video

As BP’s busted well continued to gush oil into the Gulf of Mexico nearly two months after the Deep Water Horizon’s “blowout preventer” failed to deliver as promised on April 20, a couple of locals took to the Krog Street tunnel to voice their frustration, painting “fu bp” above the DeKalb Avenue entrance. The best part, though, was the FU BP TIME-LAPSE VIDEO that circulated the following day. It showed the pair working from the middle of the night into the wee hours of the morning, ducking for cover as cop cars pass, and quickly accumulated upward of 11,000 views on YouTube. less...

The whole year long, Brittany Bosco dripped sweat on stages from Chicago to San Francisco and back promoting Spectrum — her independently released debut EP packaged in gold Bubble Wrap. But her most memorable performance comes in the three minutes and 21 seconds of the BangPop-produced video for “BLACK AND WHITE.” A haunting visual display, it highlights Bosco’s subtler side and her smoldering, Sarah Vaughan-like vocal textures in a way barely hinted at onstage. Accompanied by naked piano keys, Bosco laments her forlorn lover while the camera taunts and teases her with tightly framed black-and-white shots and soft fades. She pulls off the nod to film noir without any unintended hokeyness, and instead perfectly embodies the era when ladies sang the blues wearing long, white satin gloves. And when she gently caresses her collarbone and lifts her doe eyes to the camera, it appears that the lost art of sophistication is on the come-up once more. www.myspace.com/brittanybosco. less...

The music video for MASTODON’S “COLONY OF BIRCHMEN,” a single from its acclaimed Blood Mountain CD, shows malicious Yeti-like creatures traipsing through forests while the quartet performs in front of a trickling waterfall. As the band howls and swings its instruments, deep primary colors frame its image. Near the end of the clip, a series of animations appear: wolves decapitating each other and a mountain melting into a pool of blood. “Colony of Birchmen” was partly shot in Stone Mountain, and the band’s performance scene was filmed in a cove at Ruby Falls in Chattanooga. But the sum of its images is more interesting than most Atlanta rap videos with their litany of whips and chicks. less...