DUDES. I’m sorry this is late. I got bogged down in work and homework and then I went to see Jaws in a theater and I forgot to post. Anyway, here’s this spacefiller post that I’m totally not happy with. Hopefully someone gets something out of it.
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The other day, I read back over the post that I did on black metal music videos a few years ago, and decided it was probably time for another. This coincided with the release of the new Dark Funeral video for “Unchain My Soul,” which is astoundingly goofy and worthy of sharing (although the song is very decent, says the girl who doesn’t like Dark Funeral all that much). There’s not much of a point to this post beyond “look at this cool stuff that has happened” and some observations about the changing nature of black metal cinematography, but it’s always good to have more music video fodder, yes?
So let’s just start Dark Funeral, shall we? Dark Funeral has a new album coming out this year, and I actually like “Unchain My Soul,” despite my typical stance that they haven’t done anything good since the 90s (it’s horribly overproduced, in my opinion, but it’s catchy). The video, however, J described as looking “like a video game from 2004.” I’m not sure what the message is here, unless it is that dark hooded figures associated with black metal and Satan like to walk in the woods, which is kind of a given. Although the pig’s head is a nice touch in a throwback-to-the-early-nineties-Mayhem sort of way. (Aaand I’ll be reviewing this album soon over at Burning Fist, so yay!)
My personal favorite part of this video is the flaming pentagram and inverted crosses. It’s got a certain “Satan’s first Geocities website” flair to it.
Fortunately for all of us, it seems that we may get more silly black metal videos as Dark Funeral’s competition over in Norway, Dimmu Borgir, have promised us a new album for 2016. You know you’re excited for more stuff like this. I share this one because it’s obviously the best Dimmu lineup.
I also share it because I don’t know what’s going on here. At all. But it’s going on in glorious, high definition.
Rotting Christ has also been busy with the video-releasing in support of their (awesome, excellent, you need to check it out if you haven’t) new album Rituals. First of all, there’s this little gem that I yelled a bit about last week, which is a hymn to Shiva, and then No Clean Singing brought this to my attention a couple of days ago, making me glad I held off on this post. Watching this video brings out even more really cool aspects of the record, and now I’m looking forward more than I was before to doing a review of this for y’all.
Additionally, Abbath’s new video for Winterbane is also really cool. You get traditional Immortal synchronized headbanging, but that’s… about it really. There’s no crabwalk, and this video actual features a shaman-ish troll-ish forest creature thing… I have no way to accurately describe it. But it crawls into the water all Jenny Greenteeth-like, but since I’m pretty sure the imagery isn’t Celtic that doesn’t fit. Either way, it’s super cool, and where the stars go all sparkly at 3:07 makes me super happy. King ov Hell’s bass lines also get emphasis in the video, which is cool (hooray for bass in black metal!) and Abbath’s look at the end is fantastic.
Bonus- there’s an un-corpse-painted Abbath face in this video.
At the risk of inundating you with lyric videos, because that is the hip thing to do if you are black metal band putting out music in 2016, I will leave you here with an older video. I like to imagine that Aosoth made this video at the behest of a long-suffering agent, and chose the longest song on the album out of which to make a terrifying visual. It’s gloriously creepy and obnoxious because of it’s sheer length, and you get to listen to Aosoth while it plays (you luckies).
Enjoy, kids. And I’ll be back soon where I will assuredly scream about fun things like the fact that I get to see SHINING and PANOPTICON in the fall and DESTROYER 666 and GHOST next month and that MARDUK ❤ is coming back to play in ma ville. Also the brand spanking new book that Necrobutcher wrote that appeared on my doorstep yesterday, and all sorts of fun things.
-H
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