Images of landmarks as dust and rubble amid a pockmarked earth and devastated, re-shaped continents should be familiar enough to anyone who’s spent time amid the History Channel’s sundry apocalypse-porn CGI specials about major impacts, and yeah, there’s definitely a certain catharsis watching a giant asteroid looming above this pale blue dot waiting to unleash firestorms and nuclear winter to speed up the mass extinction that mankind seems so bent on perpetuating. Ka-boom, and all that.

In Cowboys & Aliens‘ new video for “Morbid Orbit,” the story seems to be of the aftermath of same — no breathable air, humanity hunkered down, survival in question. We see a lone figure staggering, people emerging from some kind of bunker to witness the wrecked landscape under a dirty sky. I feel like we’re due a really good end-of-the-world movie. It’s been a while, right? There were a ton for a while there. Everything’s comic books now. Maybe the thing to make is an end-of-the-world comic book.

Either way, amid Cowboys & Aliens — whose most recent full-length was 2019’s Horses of Rebellion (review here) — celebrating 25 years as a band, they’ve released “Morbid Orbit” as part of the Polderrecords compilation, PolderRiffs Vol. II, and they can be seen in the video witnessing the end of definitely-most things with various skyscrapers in the background, among them London’s Strata SE1 with its telltale windmills integrated into the top of its construction.

The message there? Maybe that humanity pretending to give a crap about the environment was too little too late, or moot anyway? Or maybe it’s just a cool looking futuristic building, which, frankly, is legit. Presumably when the tsunamis come, that’ll be the final say on that as well.

The good news, aside from the fact that all that havoc looks awesome in 4K, is the song is also catchy as hell and broadly spacious enough to encompass most of the video’s nine minutes. Cowboys & Aliens lead off PolderRiffs Vol. II and share time there with Wheel of Smoke, Cavaran and others, and they’re well positioned to represent Belgium’s heavy rock underground in both its history and how they’ve grown into their style over the years since they made their full-length debut with 1998’s League of Fools.

Though I suppose the perspective there might be somewhat aligned. It’s still ‘always this and that,’ but sometimes “that” is a big rock taking out the whole planet in one go. These things happen.

So enjoy!

Cowboys & Aliens, “Morbid Orbit” official video premiere

Legendary stoner outfit Cowboys & Aliens from Belgium are celebrating their 25th anniversary this year!

They are currently writing and recording new songs for a new album due early 2022, but for the occasion they have finished one song completely, it’s featured on a vinyl exclusive compilation: POLDERRIFFS that was released on Record Store Day June 12th.

Various Artists, Polderriffs Vol. II (2021)

Cowboys & Aliens on Bandcamp

Cowboys & Aliens on Thee Facebooks

Polderrecords website

Polderrecords on Thee Facebooks

Tags: Belgium, Bruges, Cowboys & Aliens, Polderrecords, PolderRiffs Vol. II

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2021 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Bootleg Theater. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.