Today's Pick

Coldplay has unveiled a haunting black-and-white music video for chilly new track "Midnight," an atmospheric track absent of the anthemic rock elements of earlier chart-toppers, but overflowing with hints that frontman Chris Martin and company have been spinning Bon Iver records pretty hard as they prep a sixth studio album, their first album since 2011's "Mylo Xyloto," which heard them sprinkle pop electronics over their soaring serenades, but the first teaser from upcoming album No.6 strays much further beyond that. It's subdued, murky, twinkling, but definitely not lead single material on first listen.
The ethereal track's desolate feel and heavy use of vocal overdubs, along with what sounds like a vocoder, feels more Bon Iver or The Knife-like rather than U2 and Radiohead, the group's traditional targets of comparison. A far cry from the anthemic chorus of their most recent track, "Atlas," which doubled as their contribution to the Hunger Games: Catching Fire soundtrack, "Midnight" is one of the group's most understated singles. For five minutes, the British rock band maintains a slow pulse highlighted by shimmering synthesizers that have more in common with downtempo EDM than Coldplay's piano rock. It's the band at their most spacious and ambient, stripped down to a ghostly essence.
What hit us the hardest is Martin's plaintive, thoroughly treated vocals. The frontman's tone has become ubiquitous in modern soft rock, but "Midnight" hears it distorted, with any hint of recognition gently drifting away further into the darkness. Martin intones heavily affected vocals that, at times, resemble early Nineties Peter Gabriel as he sings about darkness, while the synths build throughout the track before a skittery, rave-like keyboard line flits about noisy static. The track closes with Martin asking that a light be left on. Maybe somewhere deep within the effects-heavy murk of his more incoherent lyrics is something that explains just why the song came out at a time local to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.
The Mary Wigmore-directed atmospheric clip, matches the mood of the tune, is dark and chilly, full of black-and-white photo-negative images and what looks like heat-sensitive silhouettes of Coldplay's members ambling through some sort of parallel universe X-ray forest. Set primarily in a wooded area and shot in negative exposure, the trippy "Midnight" clip follows the band as they dance around to an airy electro-pop arrangement. You also get glimpses of a wandering wolf along with sped-up cityscapes. What Martin and his Auto-Tune will sound like when morning comes and they're out of the woods, we'll have to wait and see. Enjoy its subtle spookiness below.

English art rock trio London Grammar have unveiled the video for "Strong," the latest cut lifted from the fast-rising youngsters' debut album, "If You Wait." One of the big success stories of 2013, the three piece Hannah Reid, Dot Major and Dan Rothman, have already experienced chart success with their pop anthem "Wasting My Young Years," and are set to eclipse that with "Strong." An epic, haunting ballad, the video is a cinematic experience, featuring a father caring for his child in adverse conditions, dressing up as a robot and covering himself in fireworks for her entertainment.
London Grammar hasn't been around long, but each of their singles has been better than the last, building on an expansive, wide-eyed brand of pop which evokes slow-moving images of young people falling in and out of love. The newest offering, "Strong" is such a dark and moody, down-tempo number. It continues on from their previous entry with its sonically powerful melodies and lyrics. London Grammar are like a cross between the xx's minimalism and Florence and the Machine's opera indebted style.
They can conjure emotions without hammering you over the head with them, on the autumnal "Strong", lead vocalist Reid showcase of her abilities with a timeless, tranquil quality that immediately silences everything around it, as she singing abstractly about some unspecified pain of being "wide-eyed and I'm so damn caught in the middle," plotting coordinates where romantic idealism and reality meet to disastrous results. The slowburn track has some shades of the xx especially in the guitar lines, but Reid's emotional vocal performance sounds more arresting than ever here, and it glides across the song's delicately layered canvas.

The emotionally stirring number is a moody, fairly downcast number with a powerful chorus, whilst the Sam Brown-directed video, equally as beautiful, featuring some absolutely amazing pyrotechnics and depict the endearing relationship between a father and his child putting on a unique fireworks show with a twist what looks like some kind of attack, is a strange affair that alternates between shots of the band wandering the streets of an apocalyptic-looking Los Angeles and a story with a rather bizarre ending. Watch a father's amazing act of love below.

After performing her new single "Freedom" at the American Music Awards Sunday night, Nicki Minaj is feeding her hungry Barbz once again and opting for the glam over the wacky with a new video for her middle-of-the-road R&B tweets, which is the second single from the re-release of her sophomore album, "Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded: The Re-Up," where she talks about her road to success, her idea of fame and dives into how she isn't interested in having any big names collaborate with her on tracks. The rapstress is obviously trying to make a statement on her newest video.
Fame is a funny thing, especially when it comes to someone with such obvious talent as Minaj, whose stardom seemed assured from the start. It was only a few years ago that the superstar rapper earned her ubiquity with a string of explosive, immediately identifiable cameos. With a whip-smart wit, fantastic verbal skills and a fluid, inventive flow, Minaj was and remains a game-changing talent in a very competitive field. While she seems to not be a big fan of any artist right now, she is still showing plenty of love to her fans.
Written by Minaj herself, "Freedom," a shockingly mediocre humblebrag track finds Minaj recounting her ascent, her fame, her talent, her wealth and all that it affords. Musically, the song is a lowtempo alternative hip hop and ambient genre song also influenced by pop music. Lyrically, Minaj is still confrontational yet reflective, talking about her life and her being in the spotlight and fame. "Freedom" takes Minaj in a more reflective direction, as she looks back on her meteoric career in typically self-aggrandizing form and her rapping and positiveness towards the emotion behind the song.
Minaj braves the elements in the Colin Tilley-directed stylish clip which features the 29-year-old pop-rap superstar in a series of gorgeous high-fashion looks against various back drops from Noah's Arc to mansion banisters to modern sculpture donning a multi-colored gown out in the middle of the dreary English countryside before ascending the stairway to heaven, as smoke fills the space behind her while lip-syncing the song. The clip starts out in black and white, and transitions into the more lively and colorful world, which seems to be a way of interpreting the freedom aspect of the song.

The electronica singer Moby has unveiled the video for his brand new single "The Day," starring Heather Graham as a beautiful angel who slays demons. "The Day" is the lead single from Moby's forthcoming tenth studio album "Destroyed," due out on May 16. Moby surprised us with a glammed-out, synth-heavy ode, the track can be loosely described as a return to a more electronic sound, which was less found on his last album "Wait For Me," which was more ambiental in nature.
Indirectly inspired by David Bowie and Brian Eno's production circa Low and Heroes (which Moby believes is now part of his DNA), the song is one of the few tracks from "Destroyed" that Moby himself sang on. Moby talked about the track on his website blog and he'd said "'The Day' was written in a hotel room in Spain at dawn when I hadn't slept. It was a beautiful hotel room, a beautiful perfect hotel room and it was six or seven in the morning. I wrote it on a acoustic guitar and recorded it on my phone, brought it home and re-recorded it with old broken down electronics that I have in my studio."
A deeply personal song about late night desperation and dark-night-of-the-soul disquietude, the video for "The Day," directed by Evan Bernard and eyeball, features Moby's friend and actress Graham in the role of a nurse/guardian angel "who gets to slaughter demons," explains Moby. "I had this simple idea of Heather as an angel in a hospital. Evan expanded upon it and made it a lot more interesting, a lot more compelling." Even with the thinly-veiled Christian metaphors, the surreal imagery of Graham floating through the air and Moby performing on the ceiling like a spiritual Lionel Richie make for a true visual treat to accompany a sonic step toward the sublime.
The basic plot of the video, according to Graham, is "a woman is lying in a hospital bed and I am the nurse and I give her some oxygen. Then it cuts to me as the angel flying, and then you see this scary demon." The director elaborates: "She (the angel) is the defender of righteousness. She represents good, and she's defeating evil." Climaxing in a metaphysical battle between demon and angel, the video is filled with surreal imagery in an eerie clinical setting.