Video Of The Week #15: Kleenex Girl Wonder – Plight [PREMIERE]

Brooklyn, NY indie-rock smart ass wordsmith pop laden heroes Kleenex Girl Wonder have given us the premiere to their video for the song “Plight” from their recent record “The Comedy Album”. The song and video are inspired by both an art installation by Joseph Beuys and Rihanna, a touching piano song replete with brothers in arms harmonies that ripple with a dark underbelly of tragedy that has befallen American culture. The video is a reconstruction of Rihanna’s ‘Stay’ in tribute to that songs inspiration.

Here’s what Kleenex Girl Wonder’s Graham Smith says about the song and video:

Around the time that The Comedy Album burst into conceptual being, I stopped in Paris en route to Barcelona. As I always do, I visited the Centre Pompidou, and stumbled across a two-room installation by Joseph Beuys entitled “Plight,” which blew my mind in a way that very few pieces of art ever have. Something about the amount of space it takes up in the permanent collection, combined with its obsessive construction, as well as its central themes of noise being overwhelming and rolls of military-looking felt being a balm. I resolved to write a song that captured my epiphany and the wonder I felt (pun intended) when I encountered this wonderful piece. I also wanted to write a song that gave me the same shivers as “Stay” by Rihanna, so I combined my two ambitions and wrote this song. It seemed only fitting, all things considered, to make a video which was a shot-by-shot remake of that song’s video. Even if it meant getting totally nude, and being incredibly sexy and vulnerable. These are the things we do for art. Doug Lussenhop shot and edited the video, and that’s his super sweet poured concrete tub.

“For Kleenex Girl Wonder, it’s been nearly 20 years of agony and joy, 20 years of stupid GBV comparisons when it’s obvious to anyone paying attention that KGW mastermind Graham Smith is the Ray Davies of his generation—except Smith watches the world go by on his screen instead of from a window. And now comes The Comedy Album. Clocking in at nearly 76 minutes, on double vinyl from Reesonable Records, it’s KGW’s defining statement, their magnum opus (magnum hopeless?). It goes emotionally deeper than KGW’s ever gone before—more desperate, more despairing—and yet it echoes all the great moments that have come before. The Comedy Album is about what it feels like to be too alive and too in touch with everything around you—unable to stop noticing the bullshit and the beauty, the shallowness and the depth.”