Melanie Martinez’s latest music video, “Cry Baby,” is a creepy mix of fantastic sound and beautiful imagery, and it adds to the strange horror that her album embodies. Instead of just creating music, Martinez has chosen to make an entire mythos including Gothic costumes and terribly sad stories hinting at the both fantastical and the paranormal, like many in the electropop subgenre.

Martinez created the concept and directed the video herself. In the video, an apathetic mother births a crying Martinez who is later attacked by dancing toys. In another video, “Sippy Cup,” Martinez’s mother seemingly murders her after killing her father. The audience is led to believe that this is the ending to the “Cry Baby” video: Martinez up in heaven, with large angel wings.

These videos should come across as gruesome — and they are — but because of the fantastic use of color and pop, there’s an element of fun to the seemingly awful. It’s like the musical “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” — while eating people in meat pies isn’t socially acceptable, the singing at least eases the sting.

Martinez isn’t the first to create an entire universe around her sound, and she won’t be the last. Portland band The Decembrists made a relatively unknown rock opera entitled “The Hazards of Love,” that included a beginning, middle and end, telling the story of two lovebirds that —spoiler alert — doesn’t end happily. Young Heretics’ first and last album “We Are the Lost Loves” features mainly animal imagery, switching between an animal war and a wolf who loved a rabbit with layered, odd sound.

While both of these albums were a success, there is a danger in overdeveloping a world. Artists can become pigeonholed or predictable, and then the sound gets boring. Of Monsters and Men’s first album, “My Head is an Animal,” featured mostly animal and nature imagery, creating a folky, natural setting. The band’s second album, “Beneath the Skin,” did the same. While some listeners loved it and thought it built well, others found the repetition too safe and saw the album as a bit of a flop.

Young Heretics escaped this curse by simply not making a second album. The Decembrists left behind their rock opera by creating something completely different in later albums, just adding “The Hazards of Love,” to their long list of experiments. As for Martinez, it’s difficult to say how she will develop her brand and sound as it is seemingly tied to her Gothic Lolita style.

Whether or not Martinez chooses to keep her mythos or scrap it completely in future albums is left to be seen, but as for the “Cry Baby” universe, Martinez has created an interesting world to house her electropop sound. I’m certainly not crying over it.

Emera Riley is a sophomore magazine journalism major. Her column appears weekly in Pulp. You can email her at elril100@syr.edu or follow her on Twitter @emerariley.

Published on March 22, 2016 at 9:32 pm