Awful Metal Video of the Week: Timeswitch Engrace - Hymn of a Broken Man

For those of you who are understandably unfamiliar, Times of Grace is a "side project" that was started by Adam Dutkiewicz, lead guitarist of Massachusetts metalcore group Killswitch Engage. 

Yeah, that guy. 

Along for the Times of Grace ride comes pre-Howie Killswitch singer Jesse Leach, as well as second Killswitch Engage guitarist, Joel Stroetzel. So we have the first singer of KSE, along with the two most prominent members of the outfit. Howie for all we know has been MIA since he had to quit a tour for alleged "unforeseen circumstances"/back pain/knocking up a porn star. God knows this sounds like more of the same musically, we have all the members in place who matter, so why can't we just call it more KSE? If you put some new tires on a Chevy, and replace the logo with a Cadillac badge, you're still driving a goddamn Chevy. I don't know, you be the judge.

So it goes, if you (aren't a metalhead and) bought the special edition of a Hymn of a Broken Man from iTunes, the album included music videos for some of the songs. All of which seem like they're done by a film student out taking some shots of random shit in nature. In particular, we're going to look at the video for the title track, where we're out playing in the desert. There's a chick and a stand-alone window and a bug and some more desert. That's pretty much it. Who gives a shit?

Let's think like artsy folk here to make sense of all this. The song is called "Hymn of a Broken Man". I guess the desert implies emptiness, like of the heart or of the soul? Great, I already feel like a douche. It's just sand and pebbles and you wanted to film a shitty little beetle scurrying around like it means anything. It doesn't. So now we have this broad crawling through the "desert window" on all fours towards the camera, with curtains flowing in the wind. Her face is constantly skewed with special effects, which one might believe would have some additional artistic meaning. I'm certain however, that she asked to have her face skewed so she could hide from the fact that she had any involvement in such a stupid video.

Obviously all the shots of high, rocky hills symbolize the high hopes and steep obstacles a "broken man" has to face in his life. Obviously...

Here's the chick again, and she has some shit on her hands. Mud? Feces? Pudding? Cake? Whatever edible dessert it once was, it looks like it belonged to the camera man, no less. He's really pissed and chases the girl through the desert. She manages to escape. I don't know what he's so upset about, although on second thought, this is a desert, and whatever she got into, it's probably all they had to eat.

Good lord, they'll give anybody a camera these days and let them do what they will with it. Makes me sick. See you next week if I can find a music video that's worse. If possible.