Watch Mr. Bungle's nuclear war-inspired "Sudden Death" video, dir. Derek Cianfrance
Mr. Bungle have released a new video for “Sudden Death” off their new album The Raging Wrath Of The Easter Bunny Demo, the studio-recorded version of the songs from their 1986 demo (and a couple covers), with help from Scott Ian (Anthrax) and Dave Lombardo (Slayer). The video was made with acclaimed director Derek Cianfrance (who previously worked with Mike Patton on The Place Beyond the Pines), and it’s a grainy, nuclear war-inspired film that looks like it could’ve been made the same year Bungle originally wrote these songs. Cianfrance says:
If you lived in Lakewood, Colorado, during the early 1990s, there’s a slim chance you would have seen and heard a 16 -year-old boy driving slowly around town in a white, 1974 Mustang II, with his windows rolled down, disrupting the neighborhood by blaring the music of Mr. Bungle. That 16-year-old kid was me, and that music that I listened to, over and over and over again, set the bar for my life as an artist. So, 30 years later, when I got a call from Mike Patton asking me to direct a music video for one of the songs on their new album, The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny Demo, I questioned whether my life was really a dream… I informed Mike that I had never directed a music video before, but he wasn’t dissuaded. I listened to the album and asked if I could work with the song “Sudden Death.” It reminded me of the feelings of angst I carried throughout my youth while growing up in the shadow of a looming, forbidding thermonuclear war. I decided I could make a short film (well, not so short – the song is almost 8 min!) about these fears that haunted me. I was also interested in meditating on the theme of desensitization in modern society, where citizens are gradually and systemically numbed to the possibility of cataclysmic consequences. Since the song was written in the mid-‘80s, I determined that the video should feel like it was made during that time and imagined it as some sort of rediscovered relic. Shooting during a global pandemic proved a fitting backdrop to the malaise of the song. It also presented a unique challenge as I was too nervous to work with actors – so I had to come up with another solution. making this video with a small team of trusted collaborators, and working with my life-long heroes, was nothing short of a total dream come true.
“When we first worked together, he told me he was a fan, and I didn’t believe him,” Mike Patton added. “Years later, he told me he gravitated to the most difficult tunes on Bungle records (“Dead Goon,” “Merry Go Bye Bye,” “Goodbye Sober Day”) so him choosing “Sudden Death” for this iteration of Bungle actually made perfect sense. The least commercial and longest song? That’s where his ears and eyes go.”
Watch:
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Recent Metal Album Reviews
Napalm Death – Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism
Napalm Death are best known as a grindcore or a death metal band, but ask long-running vocalist Mark "Barney" Greenway about their influences these days and he'll tell you Killing Joke, Young Gods, My Bloody Valentine, Bauhaus, The Birthday Party, and the Cocteau Twins. Earlier this year, they released a Sonic Youth cover, and though it could seem like an eccentric choice to some, "to us actually, the Sonic Youth cover is not that much of a step in a strange direction," Barney said. Not that Napalm Death have ever been easy to pin down, but -- like fellow long-running, shapeshifting heavy bands Neurosis and Swans -- their recent material has been especially genre-defying. Their most recent album, 2015's Apex Predator - Easy Meat (one of my 20 favorite metal albums of the 2010s), was clearly indebted to noise, industrial, goth, and other sounds that go far beyond your average deathgrind album, and ND incorporated all of it in ways that felt genuinely groundbreaking - no small feat for a band who had helped invent an entire subgenre three decades earlier. Now they're back with Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism, and it's once again a genre-defying, groundbreaking work.
Throes has its grindy moments like opening tracks "Fuck the Factoid" and "Backlash Just Because," but as the album goes on, it slows to a straight-up punk pace and even briefly settles into a mid-tempo post-punk groove (on "Amoral"). By not playing everything at whiplash-inducing speeds, and taking advantage of spacious production, Napalm Death were really able to open up their sound and go in all kinds of new directions. You can hear plenty of the less heavy influences that Barney speaks of coming through, but as he says, "I kind of twist [them], make it more abrasive." And it is indeed a very abrasive album, just one that takes more into consideration than eardrum assault.
Napalm Death -- a long politically outspoken band (whose cover of Dead Kennedy's "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" is just about as famous as the original at this point -- also take into consideration the world they're releasing this album into. "My thing really, specifically with this album, was we have a certain atmosphere within the world right now," Barney told MetalSucks. "There is a separation of peoples, there is a discrimination and dehumanization of certain peoples that’s just accentuated because of that populist, nationalist, protectionist sentiment... so I thought it was very important to focus on this stuff [on the album]." It's not an album that explicitly takes on people like Trump and Boris Johnson -- it's a little more poetic and open-ended than that -- but the anger and dissatisfaction that informed these songs is palpable and they'll resonate long past this current era.
Necrot – Mortal
Primitive Man – Immersion
Boris – NO
Ulthar – Providence
Terminal Nation – Holocene Extinction
Oranssi Pazuzu – Mestarin kyns
Ulcerate – Stare Into Death and Be Still
Code Orange – Underneath
Huntsmen – Mandala of Fear
Umbra Vitae – Shadow of Life
In the time since Converge last released an album (2017's great The Dusk In Us), frontman J Bannon explored his softer side with Wear Your Wounds' excellent sophomore album Rust on the Gates of Heaven, and now he's taking the exact opposite approach with the debut album by his new band Umbra Vitae, the most punishingly heavy album he's released in years. "While working on the previous Wear Your Wounds album, my love for Death Metal was rekindled," J said, "likely [as] a reaction to working on non-aggressive music for such a concentrated period."
Umbra Vitae shares a couple other members with Wear Your Wounds -- Mike McKenzie (also of The Red Chord) and Sean Martin (also ex-Hatebreed) -- and it also features Greg Weeks (The Red Chord, Labor Hex, etc) and Jon Rice (ex-Job for a Cowboy, Uncle Acid, etc). So it may be a new band, but it's familiar faces all around, many of whom are already frequent collaborators. And J may have said that death metal inspired this album, but he isn't just hopping on the new death metal bandwagon. If anything, Umbra Vitae reminds you that death metal has been in J's musical DNA since the early Converge days, and the way he interprets the genre in Umbra Vitae isn't a million miles away from the more chaotic moments of Converge. If you like "Concubine," you'll like this.
Old Man Gloom – Seminar VIII: Light Of Meaning & Seminar IX: Darkness Of Being
Black Curse – Endless Wound
Sweven – The Eternal Resonance
Death metal has been all the rage lately thanks to a crop of new bands who are taking cues from the genre's earliest days in the late '80s and finding ways to bring it into the now (like Blood Incantation, Tomb Mold, and Horrendous). But a few years before those bands released the critically acclaimed albums that brought this new wave of death metal to prominence, Sweden’s Morbus Chron were paving the way for just about all of them. Their second and final album, 2014's Sweven, is a landmark of modern death metal, and it's mix of prog, psych, black, and death metal is a clear predecessor to the current scene (and to the recent material by fellow Swedes Tribulation). Morbus Chron sadly aren't around anymore to benefit from all the hype the genre is getting, but fortunately frontman/founder/songwriter/guitarist Robert Andersson now has a new band named after that 2014 album, Sweven, and their own debut album The Eternal Resonance is very, very good.
Morbus Chron fans will probably be very excited about how this album sounds, but it does more than just pick up where Morbus Chron left off. Sweven the band goes even further down the genre-blurring rabbit hole than Sweven the album did. It's almost a disservice to talk about this album in terms of "death metal" or any other subgenre for that matter. It's still a harsh album, vocally, but instrumentally it's even more prog/psych than Morbus Chron was. For the uninitiated, Tribulation remains a good reference point because that band also continues to be more of a prog/psych band than a metal band, save for the black/death-inspired vocals, but Sweven are also a very different band than Tribulation. Tribulation ultimately write really evil versions of pop songs, and The Eternal Resonance can be closer in spirit to Pink Floyd or post-rock, with long, sprawling, dreamlike passages that are about sucking you in to the overall experience. It requires a bit of patience, but it doesn't take very long to realize it's very worth it.
MSW – Obliviosus
Vile Creature – Glory, Glory! Apathy Took Helm!
Paradise Lost – Obsidian
Paysage d’Hiver – Im Wald
The two hours which comprise Im Wald are a cumulation of everything visionary musician Wintherr has learned over his many releases -- the clean vocals which herald "Stimmen im Wald" reflect the ambiance found within Das Tor, the violins on "Le rêve lucide" recall the self-titled demo, the coldness: Kristall & Isa. It's all there, everything on which Wintherr has meditated since 1997, and it truly is perfect.
This is the best black metal album you will ever hear if you have the patience for it, and it can only be listened to in its entirety. Do not skip through this adventure through the Alps from whence this project was born. Read more about Wintherr's philosophy and the greater meaning of Paysage d'Hiver in the interview I conducted with him throughout 2017. [Jon Rosenthal]