This music video is for a song by Municipal Waste; they are an American ‘Thrash Metal’ band and are on the ‘Earache Records’ label. The video was produced by ‘The Vault LA’ and was directed by Jeff Speed. It was made and released in mid-2008; which is quite quick considering.
It is strongly recognisable as a genre product because it has most, if not all of the expected features from a music video of this genre; heavy music, images of the band playing, a weak narrative and some strong themes. It is defiantly a heavy metal video because the band are dressing in black with chains and studs, are playing guitars and are acting really over the top . It is these hints which would give the genre of the music away, were it played with no sound.
As far as I can tell (I cannot find the exact narrative for the video) the band arrive at a power station to ‘fix the reactor’ and end up playing metal instead; therefore causing slime to fill the water works, smoke to fill the sky and causing havoc in the power plant. This is what is often referred to as ‘Slime-horror’ and is rarely used in music videos as it can look cheap and dated. The band is introduced at the start of the video with the aid of some diagetic sound; dialogue and sound effects, which is fairly rare in music videos. An example of a music video where diagetic sound is used too much (in my opinion) is Iron Maiden’s new video ‘The Final Frontier’.
The visual style of the video is, as I mentioned above, typical of the genre; untidy, aggressive men with guitars and black clothing, dancing around all over the place and shouting lyrics and causing havoc. There are scenes of violence and aggression. This all comes across in the camera shots used; ‘in-your-face’ camera shots and close-ups are used to show aggression, where long shots are used to show the dress style and the detail in each shot. These shots are cut between very quickly to keep the pace of the music in balance with the pace of the video. The shots are dimly lit and use a lot of naturalistic, low key lighting.
The band comes across as being trouble-making, aggressive people who do not do as they are told; this is common for bands of this genre to try to be and Municipal Waste have done this well. The workers all come across as being quite ‘on-the-job’ and just there to work ‘by-the-book’.
After searching the internet for reviews, I could not find a negative one about this video, as it completely appeals so everyone whom likes this type of music. I found only positive comments on video sharing sites such as YouTube and the target audience has been reached successfully. I could not find any professional reviews of this video. This music video is successful at hitting its target audience because it has all of the necessary elements to a music video of this genre; it has footage of the band playing, deathly/scary scenes and is filmed using an aggressive filming style.
