Ten Rapid: the best new music videos with Gruff Rhys, Thee Oh Sees, and Daniel Avery

Welcome back once again to Ten Rapid, where we showcase a selection of the week's best new music videos, as curated by The Skinny's music team - this is the soundtrack to your Friday!

This week's playlist features some hazy psychedelia from both Thee Oh Sees and Super Furry Animals / Neon Neon main-man Gruff Rhys; super-intelligent electronica from Portland's Golden Retriever and Daniel Avery; vital new hip-hop from NYC's Le1f and Glasgow's Gasp; indie-folk from Fatherson and straight up rock and roll from The Amazing Snakeheads; and some serious weirdness from Animal Collective offshoot Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks and doom-metallers The Body, collaborating with The Haxan Cloak.

We kick off with Thee Oh Sees, who offer up a video with some very old-fashioned animation techniques from Alex Theodoropulos, recalling the best of Terry Gilliam's early work for Monty Python. The track itself is a summery, shimmering blast of warm psychedelia, taken from the forthcoming album Drop, out 19 April. 

Gruff Rhys is off on his very own magical mystery tour next - starting out in a van, Rhys travels the highways and byways of America, discovering abandoned concert halls, strange diners, star-filled desert skies and snow-covered mountains. American Interior is the title track from the singer's forthcoming album, film, book and app project, inspired by John Evans, an 18th century explorer who traveled to America in 1792 "on a mission to find a Welsh-speaking Native American tribe." Read a blog post from Gruff about the song here. The video is directed by Dylan Goch.

Next up it's New York rapper Le1f, who this week responded to some viciously homophobic comments from Brand Nubian rapper Lord Jamar. In an interview with the New Yorker magazine Jamar - a self-proclaimed "ultra-conservative" - chastised the likes of Kanye West for supposedly diluting the macho image of hip-hop by using sexperimental beats, and dressing flamboyantly. He also had strong words for the increasing numbers of white rappers in the industry, calling out Macklemore among others: "[Hip-hop] started with the alpha males," Jamar told the magazine. "And now it’s being given to the beta males to try to flex their shit." He later tweeted, after Le1f's incendiary performance on the David Letterman show, "THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING."

Le1f responded to Jamar's comment via his Facebook page, writing an open letter, which read: "Choose your battles. If the whitening of rap is a concern to you, please leave my name out of it. If you think being gay is the same as being white, you are as ignorant as your enemies. I’m darker than you. I’m African. I’m a black man and I experience all the same racism you do, if not more, on top of homophobia, including from black men just like you. Are you proud of being a hateful member of a majority? Rap started out as a creative response to oppression, and no matter my outfit, I know oppressions you will never understand."

Lord Jamar has yet to respond publicly. The video for Le1f's new track BOOM, which sees him working in a kitchen serving up dope rhymes and slick beats along with coffee and snacks, is directed by Sam B Jones, and is taken from the EP Hey, out now.

Switching gears, here's the new video from Kilmarnock indie-rockers Fatherson, taken from their debut album I Am An Island. The band play I Like Not Knowing while a bearded fan runs through the bracken in the video directed by Oscar Sansom. Fatherson play Gullivers in Manchester on 13 April, Korova in Liverpool on 14 April, and Glasgow's The Arches on 26 April. 

Portland duo Golden Retriever - aka Matt Carlson (modular synthesizer) and Jonathan Sielaff (bass clarinet) - are up next with a track from their album Seer, out now on Thrill Jockey. Visual artist Lysandre Follet created this animated video to accompany their modular synth workout, the first music video made using the Geometry Synthesizeur, and the first geometric video clip built in Grasshopper / Rhino 3D. 

Back to rock and roll now, with a blistering track from Domino-signed, Glasgow-based reprobates The Amazing Snakeheads, offering up a propulsive dose of blues riffage taken from their debut album Amphetamine Ballads. We've got an interview with the band in our April issue. The album is out on 14 April. The band play Broadcast in Glasgow on 28 March, The Roadhouse in Manchester on 2 May, before playing at Brighton's The Great Escape festival (8-10 May). Quite how this band manage to sound like they've just emerged dripping from a Louisiana swamp after wrasslin' a gator, while in fact being from Glasgow, is beyond us - but we like it.

Next up, the awesome, psychedelic video from the Snakeheads' Domino label-mates and Animal Collective offshoot Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks, for their new track Strange Colores, taken from Enter the Slasher House, out 7 April. Olivia Wyatt directed the video, which you porbably shouldn't watch without first ingesting the stimulant of your choice (by which, of course, we mean a nice cup of tea). 

Did somebody say acid? That's right, it's the new video from Daniel Avery, who features in our forthcoming feature on in-the-city and one-day music festivals in the UK, which you can read in our April issue. The video is for the title track from his peerless 2013 album Drone Logic. 

Mr. Avery's been a busy chap since we interviewed him in October last year, and is signed up to play pretty much every festival going. You can catch him before the festival season kicks off at The Arches in Glasgow on 17 March as part of the three-day dance music extravaganza Love Action, playing back to back with his Phantasy label boss, Errol Alkan.

As we navigate the final strait in this week's Ten Rapid, we come to the dark stuff... this next video is decidedly NSFW, and if you can tell us what's going on here, we'd appreciate a heads up. Frankly, we're considering cowering behind a sofa while this one plays. The video, directed by Richard Rankin, is for a track by The Body; a Providence, Rhode Island sludge metal band with a repectable pedigree. For their latest album, I Shall Die Here, they collaborated with Tri-Angle producer The Haxan Cloak. He's taken their decidedly unhinged, bowel-shaking drums, guitars and screaming schtick and made it even more frightening... just tell us when we can look again, please.

We finish off with the new video from Glasgow rapper Gasp, who is consistently delivering top-notch material in the run-up to the release of his next album, a follow-up to last year's excellent A Series of Fortunate Misunderstandings. Nowadays featured on a previous episode of our weekly Cloud Sounds playlist, and now it gets a slick, atmospheric new video from TDSLR Photography. Keep your eye out for forthcoming live shows in Glasgow from Gasp's West Coast hip-hop supergroup Toy Control, also featuring Loki, Louie of Hector Bizerk, and Mistah Bohze of the II Tone Committee.

That's it for another Ten Rapid! If you want to cue up all of the videos, see below, or visit The Skinny's YouTube channel, where you'll find a tailored playlist of this week's videos, our recent coverage of the Scottish Showcase at SxSW, not to mention regular video premieres, and exclusive live sessions with the likes of Young Fathers, Aidan Moffat & RM Hubbert, Ubre Blanca, and more. We'll see you back here in 7 days.