Kindness riffs on Leonard Bernstein

UK singer-songwriter Kindness (aka Adam Bainbridge) has released his second video from his debut album World, You Need A Change of Mind. Even more so than the video for first single "Gee Up," "House" is basically an anti-video: even though the video is nearly seven minutes long, the song isn't performed in full.

Instead, Bainbridge opens the video with a word-for-word recreation of a famous segment from Leonard Bernstein's 1967 television special Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution, in which Bernstein waxes rhapsodic about the growing complexity of pop music before introducing Brian Wilson, who performs a spellbinding solo piano version of the then-unreleased "Surf's Up." Following his monologue, Bainbridge and a young boy sketch out the basics of the song with a pair of keyboards and a vintage Linn drum machine, then dance around a bare stage while a two-minute snippet of the song plays. Unlike the sometimes-painful attempts at sketch comedy in the "Gee Up" video, the interaction between Bainbridge and his young protégé is sweetly charming.

Kindness are playing two shows in the US this week, at New York's Le Poisson Rouge on Thursday, May 17 and at Philadelphia's Voyeur on Friday, May 18, before embarking on the European festival circuit for the summer.