The Franco-Icelandic Mélusine (Camille Faivre d’Arcier) paid us a visit last December with her “electro experimental” music and made a deep impression with her haunting dark pop tones.
Now she returns with a new song and a video, which we didn’t have last time, and it is called ‘Clean it up’; created in collaboration with French queer artist RINN. I deliberately left it for a while for this video to go public.
She says the song “explores the inner violence of cutting emotional ties, the moment we let go of something painful.”
She adds that the accompanying video, which she directed herself, helps to bring that feeling to life through its “bold and impactful imagery.”
You can say that again. It is one minute and 40 seconds of mayhem as a pure white, almost invisible Mélusine – a little like Carrie White appears in the closing scenes of ‘Carrie’ – rips apart and devours a pomegranate which somehow manages to turn into someone’s intestines, which she hangs around her neck like a trophy.
It would definitely acquire an X certificate from the film censor.
And that reminded me. In the 1990s I worked for Icelandair and the Icelandic Tourist Board and I watched quite a few of that country’s bizarre movie films. They all fell into one of two categories. Either they were adverts for the country. For example as a chase progresses, on foot or by vehicle, the action would stop so that one of the characters could remark, “hey, isn’t that the Blue Lagoon over there, Iceland’s famous hot springs which offers bathing in healthy geothermal waters?” (Cue short break for an advert).
Or they would be outwardly weird like this video is; with for example a legion of Ku Klux Klan-looking people marching over a glacier at dusk, the setting sun illuminating their golden crosses and then one of them suddenly lops off the head of another one for no apparent reason.
Mélusine’s video also reminds me of another similarly manic one from a few years ago, a remarkable performance to support the song ‘Blank Vision’ by Swedish band Ambage which is about panic attacks and features a Swedish Social Media influencester, Katrin Berndt. Who does pretty much to a teddy bear what Mélusine does to the pomegranate.
I only mention it because both of them employ visuals highly successfully to drive home their message.
Both are pushing the envelope of art-pop and rock and that’s what the Nordic countries need to do to stay relevant and on the radar. There’s no point in competing with Sheeran, Swift, Beyoncé and Roan.
Video filmed by Martyna Daniel.
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