GOOD MORNING VIETNAM!

Nope, this post has nothing to do with Vietnam. I just crawled out of bed not long ago, somewhat worse for wear after a little end-of-the-work-week blowout last night, and for some reason the bellowed words of Robin Williams from that movie of the same name blared into my damaged head. Maybe it’s because I felt like I’d awakened in a war zone.

This post has nothing much to do with Carach Angren either. I just happened to see this cover for their new album, Where the Corpses Sink Forever (due on May 18 from Season of Mist), and was reminded how much I like it. So what the fuck. Also, the creative facepaint connects to the first video I watched while chugging my morning joe. You’ll see what I mean.

And that’s what this post is really about — new music videos. I watched four of them in a row on this slightly hungover Saturday morning and liked all four, and therefore . . . here they are! I could have sub-titled this post “Bang Ur Fuckin Head and Then Melt It Down”, because that pretty much sums up the sequence of the following music.

AVATAR

I’ve developed a real weakness for this Swedish band since watching their can’t-look-away video for “Black Waltz”, which is the title track from their current album on eOne Music (we featured that video here, right after the start of this year). Yesterday, they released another video for a song from Black Waltz, which was premiered by Loudwire. This one’s called “Let It Burn”.

The video is a live performance of the song. Stylistically, the music is quite different from “Black Waltz”. It’s a straight-ahead, massively infectious headbanger, and if you’re like me you’ll be fist-pumping and yelling “LET IT BURN!” by the time you get to the end. It comes right after the jump.
 

 

Check out Avatar on Facebook at this location.

4ARM

The second video I watched was from another band whose last video we also featured at NCS (here) — Australia’s 4ARM. The new video is for a song called “Raise A Fist”, which appears on the band’s third album, Submission For Liberty, released by Rising Records in February.  This video is also a live performance. It was professionally shot at The Palace Theatre in Melbourne on the band’s recent Submission For Liberty Tour, and it’s really well done.

You can get a good clue about the music from the song’s title. It’s a fist-pumping crowd-pleaser, tightly executed, delivering a thrash attack cut with Lamb of God-style groove. Yessiree, more headbanging good times to liven up my stupified Saturday morning.
 

 

If you’re new to 4ARM, you can learn more about them via their Facebook page.

IGNITION CODE

Ignition Code are an Italian band whose debut album NewTek Lie was released earlier this month on To React Records and is now available for download on Bandcamp (here). I haven’t yet listened to the album, but the band describe their music as “melodic/math/death metal”.

Their new video is for a song called “Nothing Left”, and to my ears it has more of an old-school metalcore vibe than straight melodic death metal. It includes a punishing breakdown, and the brief clean-sung chorus reminds me why I still find metalcore appealing (though not as much as I once did) — it converts a nice, punchy piece of metallic aggression into something infectious. I found myself waiting for that brief chorus to come around. In fact, I  replayed the video right after it ended because I wanted to hear it again.

The video is an interesting one to watch, too. It splices together a story line with an ambiguous ending and shots of the band playing the song. The band-performance shots include a flashy video effect that I won’t try to describe, but it’s cool. Prepare to bang heads one more time.
 

 

Here are band links for Ignition Code:

www.facebook.com/ignitioncode
www.reverbnation.com/ignitioncode
www.myspace.com/ignitioncode

I PILOT DAEMON

We were introduced to this metal band from Toulouse, France, by Mika Andre (bassist for Eryn Non Dae.) through a year-end list I convinced him to give me for use in our 2011 Listmania series (here). Yesterday, Mika e-mailed me with a recommendation that I check out I Pilot Daemon’s new video for a song called “The Bluish Fennecs”, and so I did this morning.

It was filmed at a joint called the Celtic Pub, which seems to be in Tarbes, France near the Spanish border. The band space appears to be the size of a walk-in closet, just a cleared area on the floor — filled with the moving bodies of a band throwing themselves fully into their music.

I’m having trouble figuring out how the camera person filmed this performance without getting stomped by the band or the audience, but the black-and-white film recorded by a camera (or cameras) in constant motion does a nice job of capturing the energy of the scene.

As for the music, this is the melt-your-head part of this post. “The Bluish Fennecs” is a long, intense song with a chaotic, cacophonous beginning that turns into a kind of post-rock instrumental beast that reminded me of a more bent-to-the-breaking point version of Pelican or Russian Circles. Check it out:
 

I Pilot Daemon – Bluish Fennecs – Celtic 2011 -… by Mundicore
 

“The Bluish Fennecs” originally appeared on I Pilot Daemon’s Happily Depressed album (2007), which can be freely downloaded on Bandcamp here. Their most recent release, Come What May (2010), is also a free download on Bandcamp. You can find I Pilot Daemon on Facebook via this link.

Alrighty then, that’s all I got for this Saturday morning. If you have any reactions to any of this music, whether good, bad, or indifferent, feel free to spout off in the Comments. I may or may not be back today, but if not, enjoy the rest of your fucking Saturday and we’ll see you tomorrow.