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News : This Gift is a Curse premiere video for “XI: For I Am the Fire”

By on April 1, 2016

The second full length from Sweden’s This Gift is a Curse is nothing short of monstrous. It’s a noisy, dissonant beast that’s angry and devastating in all the right ways.

We premiered a few tracks prior to the release late last year and now they’re back with a black and white video that suits it perfectly, for the track “XI: For I Am the Fire”

“Director and producer Ivan K. Maras comments: “Tar, the very essence of a dead tree. Like a small reminder that everything in nature is transitory. Even ancient life that aged for millennia will eventually perish within shortest of moments. The perpetual cycle of birth and death. THIS GIFT IS A CURSE brought this reminder into music for me when I witnessed them live for the first time in my home town back in 2013. As I was driving to a distant location for a shooting two years ago, I saw a very strange scenery to my right. A vast field bordered with a dark forest and a single most peculiar tree in front of it. It was dead. With white branches reaching down towards the field and the forest behind. As if it was holding on its last moments of life, stretching to the sunburnt field and reaching out for the darkness of the forest.

This scenery sparked the idea for a script that I later sent to Jonas of THIS GIFT IS A CURSE. I wanted to explore the duality of nature: Birth/Life as well as the approach to death as something that is not necessarily the end as we know it. Nature is beauty in its purest and most chaotic form, but within this merciless chaos lies a constant cycle of evolutionary repetition. Everything is part of a cycled and therefore universally immortal.

The script seemed to fit perfectly to the lyrical theme of the song. As if the song was written for it and vice versa. It is about longing for something other than the human physical ‘life’ and its shelling. I wanted to explore the curiosity for what lies beyond the threshold and the great void. The symbolism in the video enfolds between the femininity and beauty of mother nature, ancient life and the merciless law that it will be taken when nature demands it.

The video was then filmed near Cologne in a protected area/moorland where nature is untouched since many centuries – what dies there stays there among the roots. The oldest tree is said to be a 1000 year old oak.”

The album, All Hail the Swinelord, is out now through Season of Mist Records.

About

Mitch Booth is the owner, designer and grand overlord of Metal Obsession. In the few seconds of spare time he has outside of this site, he also hosts a metal radio show over on PBS 106.7fm in Melbourne (Australia) and organises shows under the name Untitled Touring. You should follow him on Twitter.