Saturday, October 7, 2017

Video Review: 5 STAR GRAVE Eat You Alive by Dave Wolff

Official video for the track from The Red Room, released by Sliptrick Records September 26, 2017
Directed and edited by Ivan King
Special thanks to Hexe Meat Grinder
Eat You Alive is 5 Star Grave’s second video to promote their new album The Red Room; the first was Ballad Of The Vampire released in the end of August. The track the video was made for is a contentious incorporation of and horror punk a la Misfits and Balzac, heavy on distorted guitars and aggressive vocals. It’s an accessible approach to both genres, without a trace of softness anywhere. Setting 5 Star Grave apart from other metalcore bands is a keyboard sound somewhat likened to science fiction cinema of the ‘50s and ‘60s. There are actually a few different keyboard sounds that create the mystified ambiguity of garishly cornball drive-in sci-fi fare like The Thing From Another World (remade by John Carpenter as The Thing in 1982), Kronos: Ravager Of Planets, Queen Of Blood and Five Million Miles To Earth. Researching their 2008 debut album Corpse Breed Syndrome and their 2011 album Drugstore Hell I discovered keyboards were an essential part of the band’s musicianship from the beginning. I should add their early material leaned closer toward melodic death metal and at times they’ve been inclined to draw influence from Motorhead. The band also covered The Ramones’ Pet Sematary in 2010, establishing new ways of interpreting it. Through all this the band has always taken care to cultivate the keyboards’ bizarre atmosphere, and Eat You Alive shows those efforts coming along nicely. This band is growing on me the more I listen to them and I’m starting to think I’ve discovered something unique and special. The promotional video for Eat You Alive features the beautiful alt model, tattoo artist, body piercer and singer Hexe Meat Grinder whose extensive work is at her Facebook community page. In the video she meets someone for what presumably is a date; watching this I suspect some kind of bait and switch is in the works. It came a few moments later; I don’t want to reveal what it was there is another bait and switch that immediately follows and changes the tone of the entire video short. The interspersed band shots show a gritty, dirty contrast to the short, as if showing some darkness going on inside the female lead’s deepest, darkest thoughts. The video feels like it could have been made into a mini horror film. You can see some live videos of the band as well as the Eat You Alive and Ballad Of The Vampire promos at 5 Star Grave’s Youtube channel. -Dave Wolff


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