CINEMETAL ROUND-UP: NEW VIDEOS FROM CORROSION OF CONFORMITY, BARREN EARTH, STAIND, AND ORCHID
I’m gonna put about as much effort into this introduction as The Devastated put into not sounding like Suicide Silence.
We begin today with Corrosion of Conformity’s video for “The Moneychanger.” It apparently debuted on MTV, which is perfect, because it’s the best early/mid-90s video not to have been made in the early/mid-90s. Note the same smoke-and-sepia lighting from Nirvana’s video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and how the bad guy is wearing a suit (but has long hair, so it’s clearly just a friend of the band’s ’cause they couldn’t get an actor), and the guy who’s in a gas mask for no discernible reason other than gas masks look scary. Anyone over the age of thirty should recognize these as staples of old grunge videos, but like Seinfeld re-runs on TBS, they may prove novel to anyone who knows Dave Grohl as “the dude from Foo Fighters.”
We continue with Barren Earth’s incredibly fucking boring video for “The Rains Begin.” It would appear that the big idea here was to make the video in black and white so that it would be slightly different from most other boring videos in which the band stands still in front of a green screen or plain wall or whatever and basically nothing happens. Time will only tell if this strategy will work. What were we talking about again?
Like Barren Earth’s “The Rains Begin,” Staind’s new clip for “Eyes Wide Open” is a standard and forgettable performance video. What it has going for it is that the cinematography and editing are more dynamic than in the Barren Earth video. What it has going against it is that it features a Staind song instead of a Barren Earth song.
And we conclude today with “Capricorn,” the new video from Orchid. I’m writing about this mostly because one of our most loyal and vocal readers, Hetal Bhatt asked me to, I’m in a not-terrible mood right now. Vic Vaughn apparently really likes this band, too. Personally, I rarely get into retro metal bands, and, yeah, this really does nothing for me. But maybe some of you will dig it, and then you can meet up with Hetal for a nice picnic or something?
-AR
