Let’s just get right to it. Ted Leo & The Pharmacists‘s new music video for “Bottled in Cork” is the best thing you’ll see all week.
Ted Leo’s superb sense of humor isn’t the surprising thing here. After all, anyone who has seen the band in concert can attest to the hilarity of the frontman’s between song banter. What is surprising, however, is that Leo managed to both sum up his dissatisfaction with the music industry and poke fun at those retirement rumors by unleashing a music video that anything but a music video.
You see, on Friday, Leo announced plans for a brand new “musical theater project,” which was said to be inspired by Julie Taymor’s Beatles musical Across the Universe and Green Day’s American Idiot musical. At time, most bloggers took his announcement literally, but as it turns out, Leo was actually referencing a brand new video for his The Brutalist Bricks‘s song “Bottled in Cork”. Only to call it a video would be to downplay the end result.
Revealed today on FunnyorDie.com, “Bottled in Cork” sees Leo taking his talents to Broadway after he is convinced by “Reginald VanVoorst” (Paul F. Tompkins) that it is the only platform capable of making his music immortal. With the help of Julie Klausner, Leo and his bandmates enter an intense training sessions before making their on-stage debut. As for the actual production? No need to ruin all of it, but it tells the story of what happens when one signs with a record label. And yes, it’s better than you can imagine. And yes, we’d be remiss not to also note the appearances by John Hodgman and Titus Andronicus’ Patrick Stickles.
Just watch now:
