Yet another daily excerpt from Cold World…

Even in its bowdlerised form, the “Everytime” video presents a moment of existential indecision, a fugue of suicidal ideation in which the singer fantasises about her own death. A fan-generated clip [now sadly deleted] on the video-sharing website YouTube pairs these images with the music of Xasthur, a one-man “black metal” band from Alhambra, California. In the clip, Britney’s head disappears beneath the surface of the bathwater to the accompaniment of a churning miasma of distorted minor arpeggios, mechanically pounding drums, off-key synths and distant, howling vocals. This appalling sonic aura, the pairing implies, is the true sound of Britney’s inner emotional chaos. The music thus restores the lost “suicidal” content to the video, sound-tracking its implicit narrative. The clip nominates the voided, unearthly screams of Malefic (the pseudonym of Scott Conner, Xasthur’s creator) as the phantom complement of Britney’s saccharine, roboticised vocals.

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