I must be out of my mind this morning.

I just bought tickets to Opeth at the Myth nightclub on September 27th.

This despite the lousy state of my bank account right now... Maybe I just need something good to look foreward to.

Lyrics

Nifty! Moonspell is releasing a new album this month in Europe, and next month in the US (drat). I only stumbled upon it earlier this week when Sirius 27 played the title track. Needless to say, it's been stuck in my head for the last few days.

Sample, anyone?

I've developed a fondness for the Portuguese Gothic Metal band the last few months. More times than not I've plugged their name into Last.fm and listened for hours and hours. Delicious, dark, symphonic in places, their sound can be oddly comforting to me.

Perhaps it's a bit contrarian that harsh riffs, and Death Metal grunting can be comforting; music with a much brighter tone (irrespective of the lyrics) fill me with a kind of squeamish disgust. It's like being drown in honey. I want to rip through it, tear through the golden color and the stiflingly sweet air and unmask all that is ugly and painful. That release is precious to me as it was something I was not allowed to do growing up.

In a way, I feel that unmasking is my calling as a writer. I want to pull all the ugliness of humanity from its dark hiding places and force them into the light. Only then can we appreciate its subtle beauty.

I've developed a love of posting oddly poetic posts in the shoutbox of various songs on Last.fm. I began doing so after realizing so many people posted variants of "I love this song!" or (given my playlist) "It's so heavy!". In my mind, there's something a bit mischievous about posting something like the following in such a venue.

Here are some examples; for "Traverseé" by Year of No Light:

"Amazing, graceful in it's ugliness; a hand reaching to block out the sun."

For "Hyenas" by Khomoa:

"A quiet space;
a field of wheat,
the smell of coffee
and of rain."

For "The City in the Sea" by The Ocean:

"Grinding machine, terror of gears. Whom in the city can deny its sound?"

I've developed a pet peeve as of late reguarding music videos.

This strikes me as rather odd, since I've never been one to be interested in music videos before. In past years when I was into electronica, videos were obscenely difficult to come by. The Internet was just developing, and all of the sharing mechanisms we have today did not yet exist. I coveted the few films I had from bands like Orbital, Underworld, and Moby. Many of these videos were almost as fascinating as the music itself -- bizarre, funny, or even chilling imagery seemed commonplace. I still shudder at the thought of the video from Orbital's The Box, a time-lapse masterpiece of the slow decay of humankind (or however you want to interpret it).

When I developed an interest in the metal genre, I expected the same level of quality in videos I had enjoyed from electronica. Sadly, I've been disappointed. And not just once, but again,
and again,
and again,
and again.

For reasons I can only begin to fathom, most videos from the rock and metal genre feature the same thing: The band playing the song. Again and again, I direct my browser to YouTube with the hope of a throughly facinating video and I'm presented with the same scene over and over.

This is where my pet peeve comes in. Many of the songs I've sought videos have rather fascinating lyrics. The create an image, or the impression of a story in my mind that trancends the music itself. Music is a primary inspiration for my writing, as the timbre and word of the song suggests images from my own stories. I often create playlists of music by story or by character to help me "dial in" on the subject at hand. Naturally, when I listen to these songs and hear their lyrics, I think, "That's shiny, I wonder what they did with that?" The answer, more often than not it, nothing at all.

Exhibit A: "Bloodmeat" from Protest the Hero. The lyrics suggest the story of a tribe living on the stepps of Mongolia, fearful of an attack by the Gengis Khan. Even while performed in a fast, thrashing style, there's a hint of fear of the coming dawn and a weary strength drawn from inevitability. All of this ran through my mind as I typed in the keywords in my Firefox search bar for the video. I had hoped for something more, something interesting and visually appealing. What did I find in return? Another video of the band playing the song.

Yes, they tried to make it more appealing than my banal description. Odd, shadowy lighting, shaking and violent camera angles, crane pans and more elevated it above a mere camera on a tripod recording them in a studio. But really, couldn't they do better!? They had such interesting lyrics, and an interesting video only serves to increase my interest in the band as a whole. Instead, I'm met with this unimaginative crap. Couldn't they have at least tried?

Exhibit B: "Quasi Putrefaction" by Chthonic. This Taiwanese band brings a great deal of their country's history and mythology into a melodic black metal mix. Although they've been around since 1999, they're only now beginning to gain some traction in the US. If it weren't for Ian Christie's Bloody Roots radio show on Sirius 27, I would have never heard of them. For this reason, the lyrics are a bit more difficult to come by. Typical of bands of their genre, it can be difficult to understand the lyrics on first (or tenth) listen. "Quasi Putrefaction" paints a tradgic but spiritually enduring image of a nation repeatedly run over by invaders throughout its history.

So here we are again; it certainly does sound shiny, but did they do anything with the video? Take a look for yourself.

It starts out in typical fashion, the band is shown playing the song and my hopes began to sink. Then, the video takes a left turn. Interspersed with the band, are clips from (apparently) a historical movie, showing the struggle of the native inhabitants against technologically advanced forces. The lyrics and music actually take a second stage when the clips are playing and mix sung and spoken story into a fascinating blend. I may be giving them too much credit, but the simple fact is I like it, and it's better than just the band playing the song.

Why does these seeming disparity exist between my previously beloved genere, and my currently beloved genere? I wish I could furnish an answer. My suspicion is that metal, being comparatively more populist than electronica, tends to get more videos. The higher quantity depletes the local quality of each video. Electronica groups seem to have less of an opportunity to create videos, and may put far more effort into each one. Or, perhaps, I only saw the good videos as only the good ones made it to the 'Net. It's difficult to tell without further research. Either way, it does little to spurn my developing pet peeve.