A music video directed by Ellis Bahl, for the Alt-J (∆) song “Breezeblocks”.
Breezeblocks is both a wonderful song, and a dark music video. Although the song and video have different stories to be told, they complement each other perfectly.
The song, talks about loving something so much, that you’re willing to hurt both yourself and the person for it, hence the lyrics:
“She may contain the urge to runaway,
but hold her down with soggy clothes and breezeblocks”.
Very dark, yet extremely captivating. Another factor to the song, is that it references the “Where the Wild Things Are” story. In “Where the Wild Things Are”, the boy wants to leave “The Wild Things”, but gets a loving (and slightly cannibalistic) response of “we’ll eat you up”.
“Please don’t go, I’ll eat you whole. I love you so.
I love you so, I love you so”
However, the music video portrays something slightly different. How does this work you may ask? Well you will have to watch. I will have a section after the video marked “SPOILER” describing the video for those of you that may be confused (as was I when I first watched it). That being said, please watch the video first!
SPOILER SECTION: See how cinematic that was? I was astonished when I watched it. It really wasn’t something that I expected. The shots were great, opening up with the woman in the water.
So now for what happened. Basically the scene was played in reverse. The main character, the husband judging by the wedding ring, comes home to find his wife (note the ring on her bound hands) tied up in the closet. His ex-wife appears and tries to murder him, trying to stab him, chuck a bottle at him, when eventually the tables turn and he murders her with a “breeze block” (a.k.a cinder block).
Simple right? But it really isn’t. There has been a lot of discussion over whether or not the woman trying to murder the man, was his ex-wife, or mistress. I personally go by ex-wife, judging by the amount of fear (rather than anger) the woman in the closet has when he finds her. Almost as if she knew about this other woman, and was terrified for her and her husband’s safety. Personally I think if this were his mistress, then he wouldn’t really want to go so far as to murder her. But then again, she did try to kill him…
Overall, great music video! This is one of the songs/videos that I never get sick of.
So, who do you think the mystery woman is?