Cinemetal Round-Up: New Videos from Stone Sour, Motionless in White, and Chelsea Grin

I’m gonna put about as much effort into this introduction as Wes Borland puts into maintaing his dignity.

Today’s videos all have something in common: there’s nothing wrong with them per se (well, save for the music, perhaps), but there’s nothing especially right about them, either.

Take, for example, Stone Sour’s new video for “Absolute Zero.” Despite my past misgivings about the band, I’ve actually enjoyed what I’ve heard from their new album, House of Gold and Bones Part One, and this clip is… it’s fine. It’s about this dude who seems understandably freaked out to find a hard rock band playing a song from inside the walls, and then his body starts to contort, and then… whatever. The imagery becomes so redundant so fast as to induce boredom.

It’s not embeddable, but you can check out the video by clicking the below screen cap:

Next up is Motionless in White’s video for “Devil’s Night.” It seems pretty clear that the band is trying to position themselves as Generation Core’s Marilyn Manson, and while there’s nothing here as genuinely creepy as, say, the singer riding a pig, the imagery is all slick and violent enough that I imagine it will appeal to the band’s intended demographic (adolescents who loved the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, for example).

And we conclude with Chelsea Grin’s clip for the song “Dont’ Ask, Don’t Tell,” which does not seem to have anything to do with homosexuals in the military, and is possibly the most vacuous misappropriation of a phrase with political connotations since Warrant’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” But at least Warrant wrote a catchy song.

ANYWAY, the video is fine. I don’t why the hell anyone is still doing the Lex Halaby let’s-put-the-band-in-an-open-desert thing in 2012, since it was pretty much played out by Halaby himself circa 2006, but hey, whatever, this band’s fanbase was probably  seven years old in 2006. Really, I just have one question about this video: did the singer for this band always look and dress like James Hart, or is that a recent development?