Sometime Later

In keeping with my posts from the past few weeks, I am now working on my lists of favorite singles from the 2000s, 1990s, and 1980s. Of course, singles are far more difficult than albums, seeing as there are so many artists whose singles I liked but who couldn't make a good full album to save their lives. As it might take awhile to compile the lists, I am looking now at my favorite videos. And by video, I mean the actual video, not the MTV Video Awards way where it really is the song they are awarding and not the actual video. In this case I am looking at songs I enjoyed where the video either perfectly encapsulates the feeling of the song or even makes the song reach a higher level. I am not going to limit it via decade; I'm just going to go all over the place, so don't get fidgety.

The first video is from Alpha for the song "Sometime Later," from the 1997 album Come From Heaven. Alpha was the first signee to Massive Attack's label Melancholik, and they were a fairly derivative band at that. However, in the trip hop landscape that they inhabited, they sampled less from the hipper 60s styles that Portishead used and more from the sparkly Burt Bacharach canon. Of course, they imprinted their own style and made for a darker version of those cotton candy lite songs.

"Sooner Later" is a standout from their debut cd, documenting a man's failed attempts to get his partner to tell him his/her feelings. The song builds from his first simple pleadings

"Touch my hand
It's only me, listen
I'm here."

and ascends into a frenzied swirl of strings and desperate pleadings

"Hold the sun down
Hold the sun down
Hold the moon down
Leave me to rest
Want the world man
Too the words out
Only relief is
To slip through the nets."

only to be thwarted at the end with the admonition

"Sometime later."

The video could have been a maudlin retelling of the story, something you would see in any half-baked rom-com or Nicholas Sparks weepy drama. Instead, the director took a more oblique approach, giving the viewer just a few pieces of what is going on in the video, allowing a sense of mystery and dread. The elegant tracking shots zoom in on seemingly random items, but are they? Not until the end of the video is the plot understood, and at the final fade, it is still up to the viewer to come up with their own conclusion. It mirrors the sentiments of the song, that the lover wants so badly to know the outcome, but it is withheld. So much as in real life.