Pitchfork

By most accounts, Blondie's 1979 Eat to the Beat was the first album to be released with an accompanying music video for every song. Over the next two decades, scattered vanguards like Sonic Youth tried the same ploy, but the last few years have seen a boom in the audio/multi-media realm. Vying to offer consumers bigger bangs in an effort to compete with the all-powerful interweb, ambitious acts-- from the Super Furry Animals (Rings Around the World) to 50 Cent (The Massacre) to Death Cab and their planned web-only video bonanza for Plans-- are utilizing sound and vision to hook listeners' ADD-addled ears and eyes.

Attractive in theory, these "video albums" usually don't connect thanks to a dearth of great short-film ideas and/or puny funding. They can also be artistically tyrannical, taking power away from the listener by forcing cemented images upon their psyche instead of allowing them to draw individual visual conclusions. This latter drawback is especially consequential for a lyric-less artist like Four Tet, whose flighty electrorganic hybrids lend themselves to an even greater amount of consumer interpretation. To wit, this unnecessary addendum to last year's lukewarm Everything Ecstatic LP, a set featuring a DVD album along with a five-song, half-hour bonus CD of remixes and newbies. Both discs dilute their source material, often dimming its dense musical magnetism with annoying, artsy pretensions.

Kieran Hebden's previous videos span from haunting and brilliant (the ghostly, animated "My Angel Rocks Back and Forth") to barely watchable (marching band-a-thon "As Serious As Your Life"), so it's unsurprising that the quality of the clips on Films fluctuate wildly. The album's best song, "Smile Around the Face", is graciously coupled with the DVD's best video. One of Hebden's warmest moments to date is affectionately brought to the screen via a bravura performance by British actor Mark Heap.

The entirety of the day-in-the-life short focuses on Heaps' head as he falls down bus stairs, see-saws with his toddler daughter, and finally sinks into a soothing bath. Ostensibly wearing a camera harnessed to his person (the same magnetizing technique recently employed to great effect by Pi director Darren Aronofsky), the whole thing is a fascinating face study with the middle-aged thespian's worn creases and bluish bruises giving the camera gobs to work with. Heap manages to convey the heartbreak of a divorced dad, the workman's daily grind, and, lastly, the song's titular relieved expression with startling believability, making his nameless centerpiece a rare music video character worth caring about. Yet most of the DVD's other pieces don't tap into the sparkling melancholy prevalent in Hebden's calculated compositions, instead vying for silly art-house tomfuckery.

"Sleep, Eat Food, Have Visions" is an eight-minute slog filled with escalating mind-melt noize and parsed pandemonium. It does not rank among Four Tet's best moments. Couple it with a video starring orange-faced dunces dressed as insects and a pink-painted Hebden crazily licking a lollipop in the shape of a panda head and, well, it's really just a miracle I watched it straight through once. Confoundingly directed by the same man, Woof Wan-Bau, behind the striking "My Angel Rock Back And Forth" clip, "Visions" stinks like a how-to for art-school assholes. Poorly filmed and oblique beyond the slightest comprehension, it's an ugly piece of wannabe high-art filmmaking. The better-looking "High Fives" short also relies too much on seemingly random symbolism to draw out the song's twinkling mystery, with a magical droplet of water causing onlookers to develop a second set of eyes directly under their usual pair. Worst of all, these failed stabs devalue their accompanying music by locking them in with inferior visuals that are tough to shake.

The package's Part 2 is no better than your typical after-the-fact album add-on. Featuring a bottom-feeding melody straight out of Frogger, Ecstatic's two-minute "Turtle Turtle Up" never seemed worthy of a 16-minute stretch-out but that's what we get anyway. The EP's one keeper, "Watching Wavelength", pumps sonar-blip sound science slowly building into a floating piece of Fennesz-esque distilled distortion. With the song's mechanized core naturally flowing out of a thick murk, it's the type of Four Tet song that forces you to follow him.

On record, Ecstatic closer "You Were There With Me" is a sparse exercise in chiming minimalism that hints at a quaint optimism, which is beatifically defined in its video counterpart. Directed by Hebden and filmed with a hand-held camera, the simplistic work finds his significant other spinning and jumping-- arms flailing like streamers-- in various locations. That's it. From a waterfall to the beach to a forest to a busy New York City street to a record store to the middle of the crowd at last year's Pitchfork-curated Festival, she twirls. It's loose, joyous, and ecstatic while its sly splendor still offers airs of in-between inexplicability. And, for those same reasons, it's a noticeable anomaly.