By Hamutal Dotan

Let us start with this: we have no idea what this video is about. We don’t know what the lyrics mean, and we don’t know why there is an ominous-looking man literally seeking to pull the plug on Niagara Falls.
What we do know: pretty Toronto! In the midst of a hodgepodge of photographic techniques, our city comes out looking very neat. Though we’ve become accustomed to the sight of tilt-shifted mini-Toronto, this mixes in some other depth-of-field effects, and combined with the aforementioned looming plug-puller, the overall effect is rather compelling.
First discovered over at LiveJournal, the video is the creation of Belarusian rock band Lyapis Trubetskoy (or Lapis Trubeckoy; we’ve seen both spellings). According to their Wikipedia page—currently flagged for reading too much like an advertisement—the band has had a roller-coaster existence. In the words of frontman Sergei Mikhalok: “We came from the underground and became popular with our pop-culture parodies. One day to my horror I realized that our group has become similar to the objects of our parodies and mockery. We were starting to merge with all those pop-star crowd, but I’m not one of them and never wanted to be.”

Mission quite possibly accomplished.
The original poster on LiveJournal reports that the lyrics have “nothing to do with Toronto or Canada or oil,” which makes this mysterious work all the more engimatic, though this account of the video (and with the help of Google Translate) does shed a bit of light:

Group “Lapis Trubeckoy” presented in the Internet video for the song “I Believe” from their new album “Fun.” Director of the video was Alexei Terekhov, who shot for a group of famous clips “Ay”, “Capital” and “Lights.”
Visual range of the new movie is based on minimizing the effect of the world—shot in real life, people, ships, vehicles and aircraft in the video turned into toys from children’s designer, hurriedly scurrying hither and thither. In contrast, in the frame periodically appears gigantic and all-powerful Sergei Mihalok.
“In this clip, I tried to convey the impression that the person who is small fry, an ant compared to the infinite universe, really, a very important element of a whole,” says Alexey Terekhov. In principle, the used technology is already quite well known in world, but it was important the combination of form and meaning of the song. Because quite often we have seen in the clips form for form’s sake at the level of: “Oh, look how I can do.” And I always try to fill in the form of an idea.

The album Fun is due out March 11.