videos!

I apparently sound REALLY geeky when I say it, but the below video is something I imagine hearing at a werewolf bonfire.




This first video is a Finntroll song, "Trollhammeren". Any metal from this region not about burning a church will be about a celebration of some kind...you just have to remember that we celebrate with more violence than you'd think. The entire point is celebration, and every shot furthers the speed of the song - count, if you dare, the amount of times someone pulls from a skin or a stein as he dances. I DARE you. There's very little linear progression to the video, it's more about expanding on the feeling of the song, and the song itself is fairly typical of finntroll in that it extols successful celebration. If it were being used to sell the music, I'd say it would do a great job among audiences not familiar with metal: rather than subject us to the norm of seeing closeups of everyone playing and make the video entirely about them playing the song, it constructs an optimal venue, and it does so in an aggressive, but non-violent way. To the metal-virgin, it says essentially that they're just about having some fun. The sound is primal (especially the use of drums throughout the song to create the bones of the song) and it's about addressing the primitive part of ourself.

This next video is a little different.



This is an older video, it's from Morbid Angel, the album is "Domination". They're a much more "typical" metal band in that they focus entirely on death metal and their goal is to scare the hell out of you. The video's pretty old, it was the official video for the song way back when Mtv used to play music. It focuses on everything the Finntroll video doesn't: it highlights the band, from the intro shot of the drummer's foot to the guitarist solo at the end. It is made solely to sell a very dark (but cool-sounding) product.

Contrast all of that to this:



This is "The Serpentine Offering" from the Dimmu Borgir album "In Sorte Diaboli". Great album. Fairly horrid videos when you look at the bluescreen work they do. They do a sort of amalgam of the two styles shown above. They present a narrative framework for their song: that of a feudal village inundated with primitive christianity, until they're brought to task by their old "gods". This is a common thematic motif in metal, that of the old gods we've forgotten still being relevant, and still watching us. The band also throws themselves into the video as musicians, with occasionally-hilarious results. You can see this even more clearly in the video "The Sacrilegious Scorn", which I will not post here, but highly suggest you look for it - in the video the band is on a bad blue screen of a storm front where they roll dice on an old frying pan and threaten each other. The goal here is a little more simple: they're doing wish-fulfillment, placing themselves in an environment they want to actually live in. The music on the posted video has the repeated lyric, "My descent is the story of every man, I am hatred, darkness, and despair." They insert that song into the imagery of the old scandinavian christian village in order to illustrate exactly what they're talking about...