The aesthetic of both the performance footage and the animation in the new David Brodsky-directed video for As I Lay Dying’s “Parallels” differs vastly from the aesthetic of the performance footage and the animation in the video he helmed for The Red Chord’s “Demoralizer” earlier this year, as is befitting cinematic representations of two bands that play such divergent forms of metal (The Red Chord will be on The Summer Slaughter tour, AILD on The Cool Tour – the very monikers of those treks demonstrates huge stylistic differences in the music) and employed different animators for each clip. (The animation in “Parallels” is by Mike Milyavsky with an assist from Brodsky; Tim Kellan and Brodsky did the animation for “Demoralizer.”)

However, it seems to me that there are some interesting thematic connections, primarily in the portrayal of Man as a cog in modern society, robbed of His individuality. The strongest example of this correlation might be the use in both videos of not-dissimilar (and strongly Freudian) images of people drinking blood from a pipe, but it is also worth nothing that the characters in both videos have been robbed of that most distinct display of an identity: a unique face.

Of course, I could just be overanalyzing all this shit.

As I Lay Dying’s The Powerless Rise and The Red Chord’s Fed Through the Teeth Machine are both out now on Metal Blade.

-AR