Chimaira have released a video for “Year of the Snake,” one of my favorite songs from their new album, The Age of Hell. It’s a performance video, but it was directed by Todd Bell, which means it’s, like, a trillion times better than the vast majority of all other performance videos. (The slo-mo mic swinging is especially bad-ass.) Perhaps even more importantly, though, it’s the fans’ first chance to hear an awesome new Chimaira track. I mean, that section right after the second chorus? TOTAL ELEPHANTS MARCHING MADNESS. That thirty-seven seconds of music alone should be enough to make your day.

Interesting side-note about the video: earlier this week, I interviewed vocalist Mark Hunter, and he told me the following about the shoot for the clip:

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The PRP has debuted a deleted scene from Chimaira’s excellent DVD/CD set, Coming Alive (read my review here), which you can watch below. You’ll understand pretty quickly why this didn’t make director Todd Bell’s final cut, and now it’s basically been turned into a commercial for the band’s upcoming “Blue Collar Brawler” tour with Impending Doom, Dååth, and This or The Apocalypse. But I’m totally okay with that, ’cause I think it’s a cool tour that you should go to.

Also, because this makes me laugh. You’re trying to tell me you’ve never done something like this when you were alone? Puh-leeze.

-AR

A lot has happened since Chimaira released their first full-length DVD, The Dehumanizing Process, in 2004; as captured by director Todd Bell, the band portrayed in that DVD is struggling to make the album they want to make, struggling to stay signed, struggling to get good tours, struggling just to stay together. The Chimaira of Coming Alive — the band’s third excellent collaboration with Bell — are opening for Disturbed, playing arenas, and taking bets on how many copies The Infection will sell in its first week. We’re obviously not in Metallica territory or anything here, and we do see that the band’s members are still working their collective ass off (a scene in which bassist Jim LaMarca personally hands out band stickers and canvasses fans is particularly striking) — but Coming Alive has less conflict and drama than its predecessor. And while no one should begrudge a band this talented and hard-working, unfortunately, conflict and drama are the things great stories are made of.

It’s the biggest — and, really, the only — strike against Coming Alive. Luckily, Bell is such a talented guy that it also really doesn’t matter in the scheme of things.

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In case you somehow missed those banners on either side of the page today, Chimaira’s massive three-disc DVD/CD set, Coming Alive, is out as of right now. I can’t write a review yet because, honestly, I haven’t been able to get through it all — not because it’s not awesome, but because there’s just so damn much of it. The Todd Bell documentary alone is three hours! Sheesh.

But what I have ingested thus far has been excellent. And now the live CD portion of the collection — recorded this past December at the tenth annual Chimaira Christmas hometown gig in Cleveland — is streaming here. If for some reason you didn’t pre-order Coming Alive and are still on the fence about buying it, go listen and be convinced.

And I promise to have a review up just as soon as I can.

-AR

Earlier this month, Chimaira announced a July 20 release date for their new DVD, Coming Alive; now that DVD has a trailer. It doesn’t tell us that much, but the footage does look fucking sweet. Plus, it promises a subplot about one of the band members remodeling his condo! So there’s that.

The documentary portion of this thing is apparently three hours long – and that’s WITHOUT all the concert footage and bonus features. Holy shit, that is gonna be one belt-buckle-busting feast for us Chimaira fans.

Complete details of the DVD are after the jump, courtesy The PRP.

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We’ve known that Chimaira and filmmaker Todd Bell were working on a new full-length DVD pretty much since the recording of The Infection – heck, we’ve even seen a small preview of its contents. But now that DVD has a name, a release day, and – bonus! – a CD component: Coming Alive will be released on July 20 via Ferret. In addition to a new four-part, Bell-directed documentary that covers a year and a half in the life of the band, the DVD will feature a concert film of the band’s tenth annual Chimaira Christmas hometown show from this past December, the awesome “Making of Resurrection” doc that was part of the bonus DVD for that album, plus a documentary made up of forty minutes of home video footage. And, oh yeah, then there’s that CD, which is the audio from the Chimaira Christmas concert.

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There’s been so much awesome metal this year that even thinking about doing a 2009 “best of” list gives me so much agita that I have already devoted at least one and possibly three complete therapy sessions to the topic. But one album that I know has a reserved spot on that list: Chimaira’s The Infection. It came out in April and it’s still in my regular rotation, for crying out loud.

So. Videographer Todd Bell has been out on the road with the band this entire tour cycle working on what will be his forth totally excellent DVD for Chimaira, and now the band has decided to share a preview of what Bell has brewing. Per a statement on the band’s website:

We’re so excited about the footage we shot with Todd Bell for our new DVD release (due out in 2010) that we couldn’t wait to share it. Here is “The Disappearing Sun” live from Helsinki, Finland.

Here’s the clip. “The Disappearing Sun” is one of my favorite tracks of off The Infection, and it looks like it slays live:

The site also says that the group’s tenth annual Chimaira Christmas show, which will take place on December 27 at the Cleveland House of Blues, will be filmed for the DVD. I’ve given serious consideration to making my first visit to Cleveland for one of these shows every year for the past five years; maybe this is the year I finally get off my ass and do it.

-AR

Thanks to all my fellow infected Chimairacans who e-mailed me about this. And, yep, I just made up a word.

This morning I read on Metal Underground that there’s a band called Kimaera. And I’d just like to take this opportunity to say that everyone in this band is clearly some kind of mental midget. Even if I wasn’t a huge Chimaira fan, it would be hard to encourage another band to use a name so close to a group that’s achieved such a higher plane of success; for example, as much as I dislike Korn, I would never pat another band on the back for being called “Corn.” It’s just dumb. Did these dudes (and chick, apparently) learn nothing from Chimaera, a band which has apparently now changed its name to avoid any further confusion? Sheesh.

ANYWAY, the real Chimaira are now holding a contest where fans can re-edit the footage from their video for “Destroy and Dominate,” which was originally directed by the awesome Todd Bell. The grand-prize winner will receive the limited edition box set version of The Infection plus tickets to the band’s upcoming US tour, and the second- and third-prize winners will receive tickets and/or Chimaira merch. You can download the footage and enter the contest here.

Honestly, I kinda wanna download the footage just because re-cutting it seems like it would be fun, the same way re-mixing the Sacrament tracks Lamb of God released awhile ago was fun. But if you’re one of those people who constantly bitch about how shitty you think every music video is, here’s your chance to try and do better – and potentially win some cool stuff in the process.

-AR

Alright. So if you’ve watched the excellent, Todd Bell-directed “Making Of” DVD that accompanies the deluxe edition of Chimaira’s latest, The Infection – or, for that matter, if you’ve just listened closely to the lyrics – you know that Danny Boyle’s sci-fi opus Sunshine was an influence on the lyrics for the song “The Disappearing Sun.”

The band’s new video – also directed by Bell – is (obviously) not for that particular song, but it would appear as though imagery from that film was still a big, big influence on the clip. Sunshine deals with some pretty complex issues (don’t let its appearance as a by-the-numbers space opera fool you), so I’ll leave it to you to try and make the thematic connections between the movie and “Destroy and Dominate.”

This is easily the best video the band has ever made. Bell, a friend of the group’s, has directed many of their clips in the past, but he’s really outdone himself here – the imagery is just awesome. I’ll have to watch it a few more times to try and discern if there’s a method to the madness of the all the crazy pictures or it’s just supposed to look cool, but either way, I’m really digging it.

Ironically, there’s an ad for anti-drug campaign before the video, but I think we can all ignore that in the name of enjoying this video the way it was meant to be enjoyed (e.g., with lots and lots of weed).

-AR

“Secrets of the Dead” is so fucking good that it’s just made us that much hungrier for Chimaira’s for new album, The Infection. So hungry, in fact, that last week we posted crappy-quality fan filmed footage of another new song, “Destroy and Dominate” – footage so weak that you could barely hear the actual music.

Well, no need to stick your ear up to the computer speaker anymore: after teasing fans earlier today with the cryptic message “3 pm EST,” the band just posted a link to a free download of the mp3 for the actual studio version of “Destroy and Dominate” on Twitter. You can download the song right now, right here. [UPDATE: Looks like the song is down now. I'm sure clever Chimaira fans will be able to seek it out from their peers - Ed.]

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Talk about truth in advertising – I wanna hear Chimaira’s The Infection so badly it makes my skin itch. Seriously.

Patience is a virtue, though, and it looks like I won’t have to wait much longer to at least hear a lil’ sumpin’ sumpin’: yesterday afternoon, vocalist Mark Hunter left the following sorta but not really cryptic on Chimaira’s official website:

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Chimaira vocalist Mark Hunter recently revealed that “Todd ‘dead-eye’ Bell has returned to do some more filming… for a dvd to come with the new record.” And while I’m sure I don’t have to tell Chimaira fans, I still want to tell everyone else: this is great fucking news.

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