Watch Puppets Get Metal in Valensorow’s “The Bird and The Bear” Video

I wouldn’t usually stoop so low as to post about a death metal music video involving puppets but Valensorow’s “The Bird and The Bear” is one of the more unhinged things to hit my inbox this week. Pulled from the band’s upcoming album Shorestank, which releases next month.

Technically you could pitch this as a cute and kid-friendly video, but “The Bird and the Bear” is closer to an Adult Swim short made on cocaine and hallucinogens. It’s just also about a bird and a bear. The video gains even more strange charm when you learn that guitarist Joey Menicucci made the bear puppet using Youtube lessons.

“The making of the puppet video for ‘The Bird and The Bear’ was a huge undertaking for us. We wanted to capture the humor and ridiculousness that lies within the story of the song in a unique way that was within our realm of possibility as independent artists. The answer to that was obviously puppets. We quickly realized that high quality puppets can be quite expensive, and we needed our bear puppet to look a certain kind of crazy. So our guitarist enrolled in the University of YouTube and designed and built the bear puppet (AKA Beary) from scratch. The bird puppet (Larry) was found where everyone finds their oddly specific human-crafted masterpieces…Etsy.”

The official press release promises plenty more eccentricities for those who listen to the full album:

The album pairs numerous color instruments including erhu, pipa, and glockenspiel with the weight of extended range guitars and bass. The result is a colorful musical landscape full of monsters and lore that moistens the palates of fans of Devin Townsend, Wintersun, Dream Theater and Danny Elfman.