Unknown Mortal Orchestra don’t mess around when it comes to music videos. In the first clip for their latest album II, McLovin waged bat-wielding war against a hippie cult. And then there was that thing with the adorable masturbating puppets. Now we have “From the Sun,” which also strikes a nice balance between oddly playful and entirely disturbing. Directed by Rick Alverson (the man behind The Comedy, starring James Murphy and Tim Heidecker), the video follows the awful misadventures of a young man who allows himself to be physically humiliated by a group of art-school kids — seemingly his peers. He takes a seat in a chair and is licked, slapped, spit upon, made up, thrown down, taped, gagged, decorated with trash, and bedecked with an egg. Meanwhile, the band delivers a pretty little psych-rock number that sounds like a mellower Of Montreal granted access to only the best vintage recording equipment. But the happily drifting sound is offset by Ruban Nielson’s words: “Isolation can put a gun in your hand / I’m so lonely I can never quite reach the phone.”
