Goldfrapp> A&E
Having awoken from what we imagine was a medieval slumber on a leafy forest floor, a ghostly Alison Goldfrapp finds herself surrounded by a troupe of magical leaf men that ride leaf bikes and bust a move to the song's airy melody. Once again, director Dougal Wilson charms with an idea so simple and clear, it's hard to listen to "A&E" without imagining leaves in the breeze and Goldfrapp's willowy white, Earth Mother dress. If his Bat For Lashes video combined E.T. with Donnie Darko, "A&E" brilliantly melds Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" with Fraggle Rock. [Prodco: Colonel Blimp; Label: Mute] KR

Eastern Conference Champions> The Box
North American indie rockers have this weird tendency to take the most depressing subject matter and make it feel deceptively uplifting with big, booming musical flourishes. Director Elliot Jokelson captures this mixed sentiment in "The Box", an animated video about a paranoid and delusional psychiatric patient, who imagines himself as the lead singer of Eastern Conference Champions, backed by hospital gown-clad dancers. Recalling the graphic novel animation style of Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, "The Box" somehow manages to be both raucously fun and quietly depressing. [Prodco: Ghost Robot; Label: Suretone Records] KR

Daniel Johnston> True love will find you in the end
A cult icon among musicians, bipolar singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston is also known as a prolific 'outsider' artist whose hallucinatory drawings were the subject of a recent exhibition at London's Vegas Gallery. To mark the occasion, directorial collective Minivegas brought Johnston's recurring characters, The Devil and Jeremiah The Frog, to life in a mixed-media video for this sad ballad. Combining stop motion and CG, Minivegas imbue the source material's surreal comic sensibility with equal amounts of grit and flamboyance, beautifully capturing the singer's inner torment. [Label: Eternal Yip Eye Music] KR