Fans of cheesy early '80s monster flicks and cheesy late '80s metal epics take heart: Coheed and Cambria's video for "The Suffering" (3:49, QuickTime 44.2 MB), from their new "Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Vol. 1: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness," tries to distill and incorporate the very essence of both. The new album coincides with the release of a 118-page graphic novel telling the story (apparently there will be more volumes to come), but the video has nothing to do with that story line. Instead, guitarist and singer Claudio Sanchez admits, "I'm a big fan of movies like 'Clash of the Titans' and 'The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.' I wanted to see if we could re-create something like that because I thought it would be really cool."
Similarly cinematic is the video for Missy Elliott's new "Teary Eyed," a song about how love sometimes changes you for the worse. Instead of homages to monster movies past, it references gangster movies, "Fatal Attraction," and possibly "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." (4:41, Windows Media).
Veteran indie rockers Nada Surf also have a new album out, "The Weight Is a Gift." The video for "Always Love" takes to time-tested video memes -- "band playing in the woods" and "TV sucks" -- and meshes them together in a new and artful way (3:10, QuickTime: big [21.2 MB] | small [7.9 MB]; Windows Media: big [8 MB] | small). By the way, the video was shot in a Lithuanian forest that's home to the largest TV sculpture in the world.
The surprisingly catchy, poppy punk of Against Me! fared well under critical review when their album, "Searching for a Former Clarity," came out a few weeks ago, and you can see there's something slightly creepy but undeniably compelling about frontman Tom Gabel in the video for "Don't Lose Touch" (2:50, QuickTime big [18.9 MB] | small [6.5 MB]; Windows Media [5.8 MB]).
King Biscuit Time, the side project of Beta Band frontman Stephen Mason, has finally been active again after a period of lying fallow. KBT has announced he will be touring, and has a new single out in the U.K., "CIAm 15" (you can watch the video for it on his Web site). Another nice video from his original solo EP, 2000's "No Style," is "I Walk the Earth" (3:59, in Windows Media [11.8 MB]; QuickTime [7.2 MB]).
Kanye West's proclamation that "George Bush doesn't care about black people" is still making waves in the music world. A remix of his song "Golddigger" with Katrina-themed lyrics surfaced on the Web last week. Now the song "George Bush Don't Like Black People" (QuickTime, 23.4 MB) by the Incredible K.O. has been given a homemade video of its own. (You might want to check out the original [3:28, QuickTime] just for comparison.)
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