AUTRE NV “SOLDIER” from OLDE ENGLISH SPELLING BEE on Vimeo.

Olde English Spelling Bee mystery artist Autre Ne Veut has been churning out bizarro blue-eyed R&B for more than a minute now. For those of us less inclined to revel half-sentimentally/half-ironically in the memory of late ’80s/early ’90s stadium pop, the cheese factor may be a bit of a hard sell. But of all the “We Are The World”-generation Ipod crooners that have been cropping on indie rock bills recently, Autre Ne Veut’s vision is epic enough to remind me of some of my favorite outsider artists of all time — most notably New Jersey’s Kenneth Higney, who once penned some songs for Bruce Springsteen in the hope that The Boss would one day bring them to the world. Like Higney, this guy sings with enough soul-shredding emotion to invalidate kitsch as an aesthetic category.

If you, like me, were born in the year 1985, Luke Wyatt’s digi-psychedelic visuals for “Soldier” will recreate the carnival of images that once flashed through your mind as you lay on the floor of your kindergarten classroom, trying to catch some shut-eye with a stomach full of apple juice and a heart heavy with prayer for the soldiers in Iraq. Princess Leia, GI Joe, and that fat kid we saw crying on Ricki Lake last week dance like Fly Girls across our crania; little do we know it, but we are formulating our first political thought.
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