Video: The Airborne Toxic Event, ‘All I Ever Wanted’
Seraphina Lotkhamnga on
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The clip for the Airborne Toxic Event‘s new single, “All I Ever Wanted” may play it safe with the storyline of boy meets girl, but to be perfectly honest, it’s a big relief after what we experienced from the “little band from Los Feliz” in their last music video. With Nora Kirkpatric of Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros and Jesse Hoy of the Deadly Syndrome lending their acting chops, snippets of musicianship are sequenced in with the sentimental relationship bits. Also, videos aside, the Airborne Toxic Event has had no trouble promoting their latest record “All At Once.” Whether it’s an intimate show at the Satellite or at the Music Box, the feelings from 2007 stays in tact when they play “Sometime Around Midnight” today.
||| Live: The Airborne Toxic Event play Sunday as part of the LA 101 Festival at the Gibson Amphitheatre. Other acts lined up include the Delta Spirit, Built to Spill and Tokyo Police Club.
It might have been better if they *had* played it safe with a ”˜boy-meets-girl’ storyline. The video and song are loosely based on a short story by Milan Kundera titled “The Hitchhiking Game.” The story is actually ”˜young couple who have been together for a while go on a road trip. Girl is quite naïve, shy and uncomfortable with her body, wishes she was more bold and self confident, and worries she’ll lose him to someone more worldly and experienced. She decides to play a game whereby she’s the seductive hitchhiker and he picks her up. The charade is played out through the trip to their hotel, restaurant, and up to their room. He stops seeing her as the fresh, innocent young girl whom he loves, and instead as just another cheap whore (of whom he’s had plenty), and begins to treat her as such. The tenderness of their relationship is gone. She’s upset, wants to stop the game, but for him, it’s too late. He’s seen her in this disturbing new light, and now she’s a stranger to him.’
Not an easy thing to convey in a four-minute video, even with two fine actors. Worse still when you’re trying to mix in footage of the band playing. In trying to tell the story they changed things around a bit, and it took several viewings before I realized they weren’t giving each other wedding rings at the very end; they were putting them back on. File this one under “best intentions” and thank you for pointing out the Edward Sharpe and Deadly Syndrome connection – that makes it 1,000 times even cooler.