According to Lamprey bassist Justin Brown, he and Sarah Crosley took on the task of creating the band’s stop-motion video for their new song “Iron Awake” as a way of developing his video-editing skills. I don’t know much about stop-motion, but it sounds to me a little like jumping off a mountain to learn to climb back up. Nonetheless, for Lamprey, a power trio employing two basses where one might otherwise find a guitar, it’s fitting with their character to go all out.

Brown, bassist/vocalist Blaine Burnham and drummer Spencer Norman have a new record due early in 2015 recorded by Adam Pike at Toadhouse Studio (see also Red Fang, Last Giant, etc.), and while info on that is as-yet minimal, a lot of what one might need to know about the follow-up to Lamprey‘s 2012 The Burden of Beasts EP (review here), one can probably glean from “Iron Awake” itself, aurally and visually. The song is 94 rumbling seconds that pummel efficiently and broadly, an epic feel immediate in the stomping riff, echoing vocals and lead tones (yes, that’s still bass; Lamprey are wizards), Norman‘s crash huge and fitting the tones Burnham and Brown conjure. In the video, the band is represented by three loincloth-clad warriors — pretty sure those are old He-Man action figures, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you which ones — who meet various villainous presences along their path.

Werewolves are beheaded, monsters and giants are bested, and in the end, Lamprey are transported by what looks like a tooth-covered shower head with googly eyes (fuck yes) to what I can only assume is the “Stage Playset” from which individual figures are sold separately, where they pick up their instruments and rock out the last couple seconds of the song before being once more blipped away.

“Iron Awake” is the first audio I’m hearing from Lamprey‘s new release, but in both sound and in how they present it, you’ll get no argument out of me. A minute and a half excellently spent:

Lamprey, “Iron Awake” official video

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