Since forming in Buffalo, New York in 1998, metallic punk rockers Every Time I Die has been doing things their way. The group is set to release their newest album, Ex-Lives, on March 6 via the influential Epitaph Records label. Produced by Joe Baressi who has worked with the likes of The Melvins and Queens of the Stone Age, Baressi captures the group at their unrelenting best. This is the band’s highly anticipated follow up to 2009’s raging masterworkNew Junk Aesthetic, which Absolute Punk heralded as a musical “weapon of mass destruction”.
Every Time I Die vocalist Keith Buckley directed the band’s newest video for Underwater Bimbos From Outer Space. The MusicNerd Chronicles recently had the chance to catch up with Buckley to discuss the video as well as why the band feels Epitaph is the best label for the genre-bending band.
The video for Underwater Bimbos From Outer Space certainly has its fair share of provocative images. Was it important for you to give your fans something to digest and really think about as opposed to filming a straight-ahead performance video?
Buckley: I definitely didn’t want the images contained in the video to be something that could sit with people’s minds too long. I wanted to do my best to keep the images correlated to the music they were hearing. The video was our way of saying that we aren’t going for a radio hit and we are not aiming for airplay on MTV. Frankly, that was never a priority for the band anyway. We have always aimed to make music for ourselves first and foremost.
Seeing how the video is comprised of so many edits to bring the short video clips together, how long did making the video take from start to finish?
Buckley: First off, I had to scour the web to find the clips contained in the video. A lot of the clips that we used in the video were featured in an online public archive and I literally spent weeks going through it. Going into making the video, I knew what I liked and had a good feel for what I wanted the video to look like. The biggest challenge ended up being timing the clips to sync up with the music. I’m a complete perfectionist so there ended up being a lot that I wasn’t initially happy with. All in all, I’d estimate the video took 72 hours to put together.
Being on the roster at Epitaph must be completely freeing in terms of not feeling as though you have to compromise your artistic vision or sound at the end of the day.
Buckley: It is definitely a big help knowing that the people investing their time, money, and energy into the band to help us become successful. They completely trust us and are a very hands-off label. In fact, during the making of Ex-Lives, Brett Gurewitz [Epitaph Records’ owner] came down to the studio once to hear what we were up to. He offered a few suggestions and then left us to our own devices again. We can’t argue with that.
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