By now, hopefully, the latest Drouth latest record, Excerpts From A Dread Liturgy, has adorned your ears. Having just released their latest epic slice of blackened death metal, the band has also turned around a music video premiere for today for the track “An Apiarist.”
Apocalyptic in scope, the music video for “An Apiarist” is huge. Hanging in just shy of ten-minutes, use of ink splashes, dilapidated buildings, shots of nature from the Pacific Northwest, and lots of bees adorn the short film.
A quote from video director Brendan McGowan:
"Aesthetically “An Apiarist” emulates the album artwork with Rorschach-style inking, using the ink as a kind of living entity that pours out from beings' destruction of the natural world. The bees are frenzied sentience building habitats that destroy their surroundings and the jawbone deity that's kind of a "death" omen. In the beginning there are creations of life harmoniously tucked into the natural world, at the end there are creations of death – protruding from a hellscape built by guitarist John Edwards. The video is ultimately a "meditation on decay”
And epic it is. Not just as a music video, but the song as well. Melodic, heavy, mournful, and unafraid to bare teeth, the video is much like McGowan describes it: “…a ‘meditation on decay’[.]” The track starts off simply enough and builds on its intensity into something mammoth. The momentum output is impressive and keeps going until the final moments of the song.
A quote from drummer Patrick Fiorentino:
“DROUTH has always been a project about vision and about offering more than just music, the band is a vessel for a larger collaborative expression and the video for "An Apiarist" is a big next step for us as we plan on more visual accompaniments for our music and performances. Collaboration is very important to us, the unknown outcomes of working with skilled professionals is always very rewarding and we strongly believe in working with the right people, people who share our passion for creation and who are also very easy to get along with personally, we have always just been about working and playing shows with friends. Teaming up with Brendan McGowan for this film has been years in the making, we first met him in Brooklyn, NY where we contacted Brendan because we loved his 'one man black metal band' called Papacy. We didn't realize that our show at the Acheron with Papacy would turn out as epic as it was, full of spooky vibes and theatrics, especially since Brendan had recruited the members of Imperial Triumphant to be his live band. Needless to say our minds were blown and we had to work very hard just to feel like we deserved sharing the stage that night, but upon meeting and hanging out before and after the show we all became instant friends as we shared the same interests in film, literature and music. 6 years later during this COVID 19 pandemic we have to grow and adapt as a band and establish new forms of continuing to do what we love, creating extreme music and art, which provided a great opportunity to create this film with Brendan. In addition to John's "hellscape" sculpture we scouted thematic locations all over the local area of the Pacific Northwest, including old growth forests, apiarys, abandoned buildings, shipwrecks, decaying whales, and the most powerful force on the planet, the ocean.”
Check it out:
Drouth
Excerpts From A Dread Liturgy
Label: Translation Loss Records
Release date: July 31, 2020
Order here
Bandcamp here
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