CINEMETAL ROUND-UP: NEW VIDEOS FROM IN FLAMES, HOWL, VIRGIN STEELE, AND CALIBAN
I’m going to put approximately as much work into this introduction as Morbid Angel did the synthesizer work on their new album.
(That joke will seem hilarious in a few weeks, I swear.)
We begin today with the new In Flames video, for the song “Deliver Us.” It’s really just a performance video, except instead of sticking the band in a warehouse (or something that strongly resembles a warehouse), the director put each band member in a separate compartment on a ferris wheel. (Why a ferris wheel? I’d say it has something to do with the title of In Flames’ new album, Sounds of a Playground Fading, except most playgrounds I’ve seen/played in/been ordered by a judge to keep at least a five-hundred foot distance from do not contain giant ferris wheels.) And I can see how that probably seemed like a cool idea when they came up with it, but it actually gets pretty boring after awhile. So while The Third Man‘s place as “most riveting cinematic depiction of a ferris wheel” remains unchallenged, everyone involved in this video gets an “A” for effort!
Except for the people who wrote the song. ‘Cause fuck that noise.
Next up is Howl’s video for “Heavenless,” which debuted on Bloody Disgusting. Did anyone see that really purdy announcement trailer for the new video game Dead Island? This is basically the same concept, only it’s not zombies, and it’s purdy/pseudo-profound. In fact, it’s quite funny. I don’t know if that was intentional or not, but, either way, I had a nice time watching the video.
Clever viewers will note that Andrea Black seems to have turned into a dude. Well, don’t be worried, this isn’t some terrible Ellen Barkin movie. In fact, that’s not Andrea Black. In fact, Andrea Black is no longer in Howl. I have no idea what the new guy’s name is, but I hear positive things about him.
The video isn’t embeddable right now, but you can check it out by clicking on the screen cap below.
Next we have Virgin Steele’s video for “God of Violence Kill.” And, as is befitting for a song written by some dudes from New York but titled as though written by the guy from Amistad, this is pretty much the worst video ever made. I mean, I wouldn’t even call it a video. It’s a slideshow. It’s a slideshow of pictures of the dudes from Virgin Steele being all Virgin Steele-y, set to a soundtrack of the song. I can only imagine this was done as a part of an effort to make sure the band doesn’t make any new fans under the age of seventy. Why else would you make people watch a fucking slide show?
And we conclude today with Caliban’s video for “Walk Like the Dead.” Caliban is a band whose popularity has been confounding to me pretty much since the first time I heard them, and this video does not do anything to elucidate the matter for me. But it’s still better than the Virgin Steele video, because it’s actually a video, and not some thing my Aunt Tchicka would have made me watch while sitting on her couch-wrapped-in-plastic in the 80s.
And so, in summation:
-AR
