School is closed and you have an entire morning to get lost in the city of New York. You can explore every little crevice or just book it to Central Park and sit on a rock overlooking the lake for the rest of the day. Imagine the possibilities! New York band Nada Surf took a day off and embraced their city’s potential in their latest music video for When I Was Young.

Directed by Phil Harder, When I Was Young takes us through a tunnel of nostalgia for youthful times. The lyrics evoke memories of years long forgotten though fully enjoyed. The video’s protagonist is a ‘fro-ed boy who’s decided to play hooky from school and spend the day having New York City adventures: a walk down Alphabet City to the FDR, a subway ride to Central Park where people make out on strategically placed rocks, and a block’s walk to being smack dab in the middle of Midtown. He climbs a ladder to a roof and has an amazing view of the Empire State Building, bright blue background in perfect place.

A track from their recently released seventh full-length studio album, ‘The Stars are Indifferent to Astronomy,’ When I Was Young is a perfect refresher of the classic Nada Surf sound.

Out of context, this video for Father John Misty‘s track, Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings could very well be a documentation of Parks and Rec babe Aubrey Plaza’s average Saturday night. Tearing stuff up, being badass… isn’t that what our favourite Puerto Rican deadpan expert does like, all day?

Plaza describes her role in Hollywood thusly: “I play a crazy person who destroys a funeral.” Very Accurate.

Watch as April Aubrey goes completely batshit: mascara staining her cheeks in full glory and eyes glazing over in a kind of deranged delusion as she absently eats flowers, smokes apple bongs and knocks over everything in sight. We can’t help but imagine that the direction for this video was fairly minimal—all director Noel Paul probably did was say, “Hey Aubrey, go nuts!”, and a suitably distressing sequence of crazy ensued.

So, who is Father John Misty? J. Tillman, former Fleet Foxes drummer has adopted the alias to depart well away from FF and their signature twee, running-through-the-forest-gathering-up-daisies-and-baby-birdies kind of sound, replacing it with something altogether more ambitious and psych-rock. His promising debut is due out May 1st on Sub Pop and if this video is anything to go by, it’ll be absolutely mental.

If a music video experience could be a person, this is one we’d be sure to fall head over heels in love with. Over rivers and through subway tunnels we go, catching glimpses of sunset forests, international passersby, flying doves, and emotive glances. We journey through Oslo, New York City, Vancouver, Warsaw, Detroit  (and a few other major cities) in the new Pretty Lights music video.

Pretty Lights, also known as Derek Vincent Smith, is an electronic musical artist, also characterized by hip-hop dips and flavors of soul. A little trippy, his music is the perfect antidote to an oppressive presence of hustle and bustle, which is exactly why the video and track for We Must Go On are so perfectly paralleled. We witness the crazy, busy elements of global cities firsthand, but are simultaneously so appeased by the beats, tones, and synchronized voices that are unifying the track. It renders any other city excursion score obsolete.

The video was a collaboration between Smith and his creative partner and girlfriend, Krystle Blackburn. The beautiful images in the footage were taken from Pretty Lights tours to festivals and concerts all over the world. We can’t think of tour footage being put to better use. The We Must Go On single and other Pretty Lights music is available for free downloads directly on their website.

Fresh from Feist’s excellent 2011 album ‘Metals’ is the superbly executed and deeply affecting clip for The Bad In Each Other, directed by Martin De Thurah. Extending through a grand string of beautiful and delicately constructed narratives is a video that is both haunting and troubling, disturbing the waters of anxiety by rippling through like an unstitched wound. You barely know these souls—(an awkward romance; a pocket-picking boy; a devastated dog owner; a magic show) save for brief glimpses of pure emotion— yet you somehow know their stories and can vicariously feel their scars. Amongst the deep sprawl of our young, modern narratives and claustrophobically present woes, this is familiar.

De Thurah seems to have taken a leaf out of the Coen brothers book by drenching The Bad in Each other with that signature fluorescent sparseness, that dusty landscape and a troubled face distinctly echoing No Country For Old Men. Adding to the clip’s allure is an astonishingly realized anamorphic framing, warmly textured by film graininess (there’s no ultra, unnaturally crisp DSLR business going on here). I watched the clip twice in a row and both viewings uniquely hit a nerve—the first I was affected by the song and Leslie Feist’s addictive voice; the second I couldn’t separate myself from the man with his dog, and the closing shot of his daughter gathered up in a heap in his arms.

Feist is currently on tour, check out her dates here so she can make you feel feelings right in front of you.

All the deadly sins come back to haunt Eleanor Friedberger in her new clip for Heaven—too much binge drinking and voodoo land her in a very different place.  Lucky she has no problem ironising the afterlife in this utterly catchy tune from her first solo album.

The comic book narrative sees Eleanor arrive at the golden gates, only to be shown a recap of all her sins committed.  While they seem to find the petty theft a bit of a laugh, the witchcraft was definitely a deal-breaker and, with irony to the songs title, she ends up in a gothic Hell.  The video was directed by American comedy writer Scott Jacobson who has directed clips for The National and won four Emmys.

As a part of Chicago indie rock duo The Fiery Furnaces, Eleanor and her musical partner and brother Matthew have released nine albums since 2000.  And although the band is still very much together, Eleanor’s solo album ‘Last Summer’—actually recorded last summer—has been highly acclaimed since its release in July.  The nostalgic, wistful songs literally make you go back to ‘last summer’.

She managed to escape the fiery depths of Hell though apparently, and she’s touring the US West Coast this month.

Let’s be clear from the start: this list is in no way representative of Portable’s favorite albums of 2011 (we’ve got another list for that). If this were the case you’d be sifting through a lengthy list of debut albums from artists including Youth Lagoon, Craft Spells and The Weeknd.

Beyond those outstanding debuts, we spent much of 2011 listening to the new releases from artists who had already impressed us. While some artists are causing controversy with the release of sophomore records desperately marketed as debuts, we take a look at the records from 2011 that only served to further cement our standing affection for the artists who created them.

The phrase, “you will never look at polygamy in the same way again” is not one that is often uttered. You could say it for Big Love; and now you can say it for the new song Heavy Metal from Missouri-born, Brooklyn-based boys White Rabbits.

The director of this shady little music video is Andrew Droz Palermo and, boy, does he take triple-peopled domestic harmony to creepy lengths. Everyday scenes of personal grooming and breakfast preparation are made hyper-bizarre by the alteration of tiny details in .gif inspired special effects.

This film is an exploration of suburbia reminiscent of Gus Van Sant‘s disquieting communities. The deadpan faces and minimal movements of the actors contribute to a contrasting yet coinciding sense of unease and quirky beauty. Things turn surreal for the threesome post-consumption of little white tablets. As White Rabbits told NPR:

…it was a thrill to see how perfectly he [Droz Palermo] picked up on the looping piano and the suspicious tone of the lyrics as well as our profound appreciation for smoke bomb baseball.

White Rabbits’ new album ‘Milk Famous’ is out 6 March 2012 on TBD Records and they are touring to support the release right through March and April across the US.

Purveyors of fine heavy metal will revel in Mastodon‘s new music video. Their grungy sound is gloriously known as ‘sludge metal’ and this clip for new single Dry Bone Valley has been tailored to match.

Directed and animated by Tim Biskup, it combines all that is good and holy about heavy metal video clips; madness, the devil, crazy eyes and the slight possibility of upsetting religious sentiment. The clip is a montage which changes according to the beat of the song, and combines human faces, cubist masks, trees, intricate white outlined beasts, religious imagery and medieval tableaux in a constantly revolving show.

The clip seems to come out at you, with the pictures speeding out from the center of the screen. There is so much detail in here that it is next to impossible to recount all that you have seen in just one sitting. The scenes in deep space are beautiful, as are the tribal masks (one of which looks suspiciously like George W. Bush).

Mastodon are touring throughout Europe in February, and will play the Soundwave Festival in Australia later the same month.

MTV called it when they added LA duo Electric Guest to their list of artists to watch in 2012. Produced by none other than Danger Mouse, Electric Guest are gearing up for a big year of stealing hearts, selling out shows and winning accolades and fans across the globe.

We’re not sure how to classify Electric Guest exactly—their record label Dew Process rattles off a sentence of words strung clumsily and fervently together to describe the band: “Psychedelic soul-pop melody-driven, get up, get down danceathons with a modern twist.” Asa Taccone and Matthew Compton have also been charming the likes of KROQ, where nothing but praise has been lovingly spilled: “Every once in a while there is a band that breaks through the stale inanimate boundaries of modern musical genres…and that band has become Electric Guest.”

American Daydream is a kind of song that fits its excellently made video clip (directed by Jorma Taccone—frontman Asa’s brother—of The Lonely Island) so well—somehow it arrives as this pre-packaged, ready to go soundtrack to remembering last Saturday night: it’s nostalgic and stimulating and anticipatory all at once—Taccone has cleverly weaved in a narrative of jealousy and lust from a crazed party vagrant: bathing in a delicately red light (and eventually his own blood), tipping tables and flinging drinks through the air. Just your typical, destructive and dangerous night out, really.

Take heed from MTV and keep an eye on Electric guest in the next few months, there’s something big brewing.

Clever name, right? The Cast of Cheers‘ sound is a harmonious combination of instruments that will make you want to jump up and down, side to side, until you properly collapse. Still relatively unknown, The Cast Of Cheers is Dublin-raised and currently making their way through the United Kingdom, no doubt delivering dance parties and leaving audience members’ limbs limp but satisfied. The high energy music speaks for itself, both in volume and in quality.

The single is called Family, and its Russell Weekes-directed music video is simple though fun, with short and jerky movements reminiscent of Peter Gabriel’s 80s heyday. A remix of this track is currently available for a free download on the band’s Soundcloud page. Cheers previously released ‘Chariot’, a free album on Bandcamp and it did remarkably well, accumulating over 150,000 downloads.

Family will be out on February 20 through Schoolboy Error/Cooperative Music Records.