Review: Greed by Gild the Mourn (VIDEO)

Halloween season is here (for most of us anyway), and what better way to start the season than with a new music video from my favorite goth/ethereal/fairy/generally spooky band Gild the Mourn!

If you don't know, Gild the Mourn is a husband wife duo, consisting of Gopal (Bella Morte) and Angel Metro, who formed in 2012. The track Greed is off their release from earlier this year I-VIII.

Greed is an intense and preternaturally catchy track, dripping with Angel's haunting vocals. So too the video follows; a crescendo of aggressively invasive emotion. The focus here is on the characters, and the band members do a fantastic job of holding the audience in rapture. The anguish and contrition is nearly palpable. As with their previous video, Shade, we get a personal exploration of self. The stark void which the video is set against engenders an almost solipsistic introspection, and deeply resonates with those of us who have let our selfishness and greed take us to places we never thought we'd go.

Impressively, the video was filmed in just 2 days in their basement, the spookiest room of a house of course. Accentuating this sense of creepy unease was the lighting. In fact the use of light and motion really struck me, and I feel was integral to the capricious and effervescent feel of the video. Angel let me in on the process for their production: "I specifically wanted the environment to be absent of distractions so you could really focus on the characters and their interactions. Of course, by doing so we faced the challenge of having a video that could get boring quickly. To help counter act that I choose to really play with lighting and motion speed. We used some neat lighting tricks inspired by a few videos including one from the Walking Dead."

In keeping with the goth DIY ethos Angel says, "I’m a big fan of blackout backdrops, but being new to film making we hadn’t tried anything like it before. So, we were learning on the spot. A tip for those who may be interested in using one, iron ALL the wrinkles! Our crew consisted of us and Sam Eberle. He’s a killer cinematographer who just launched a drone based cinematography company called Mercury Aerials. He and Gopal took care on the filming while I directed the shots and handled set up/breakdown."

One of the reasons I have so much love for Gild the Mourn, is while they create intensely beautiful, fantastical, and atmospheric music, they are incredibly personable people with a wonderfully silly sense of humor.  If you follow the band at all you'll know their antics are both entertaining and down to earth. Some goth bands portray themselves as eternal dilettantes, enigmatically dark and inscrutable, and I find that can quickly become exhausting. As a parent myself, I've learned the value of being goofy and letting yourself enjoy life.

So it follows, the production of this video was not short on fun (as you can see in some of their Instagram posts) Angel says, "To shoot in fast and slow motion we actually had to bounce down sped up and slowed down versions of the song to sync the video/audio currently, so there is some pretty funny raw footage of us performing at crazy speeds. We had to run the sped up version a number of times because the song was so fast it was hard to enunciate the words."

In general I'm very cautious as to whom I write about and what music I cover, and for me, Gild the Mourn is worth writing about. For more music you can check out their bandcamp, or follow the links bellow.

Here is where you can find the band:
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/gildthemourn
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gildthemourn/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gildthemourn/
Website: http://www.gildthemourn.com/
Mailing List: http://eepurl.com/bNJbrL

-The Count runs the Cemetery Confessions podcast and The Requiem Podcast. For more info on The Count, click here.