By Nicole Villeneuve

Owen Pallett takes off his shirt, too, in this M Blash–directed clip for the first single from Pallett’s characteristically complicated most recent album, Heartland. It’s probably not safe for your work, office squares, but the knives and butts and blood are so fleeting that it might be worth the risk. It also has balloon boy. What is this video!?
Playing like a montage of every art-school-aspiring montage you saw on the Wedge in high school, “Lewis…” is a video as dizzying as the song. You can’t look away. And if you do, you might miss seeing Pallett stacking sponges, or Milk‘s (and the upcoming Scott Pilgrim vs. The World‘s!) Alison Pill, manic and surreal, in facepaint and a baggy tshirt twirling about and fake-stabbing herself in a loft, or Pallett again obsessively stacking things, this time what appears to be soaps from Lush. It ends with everyone dying (falling?) and Pallett blowing pixie dust over all the land. It is as strange and disjointed as this paragraph, but one hundred times more ridiculous-good, which, if our leading man wasn’t always so on with those jokey hashtags, could easily be ridiculous-bad.
(But seriously. What is this video.)