Anthrax’s “Blood Eagle Wings” and its brilliant, devastating video explore the violent foundations upon which civilizations are built.
We know that heavy metal and horror have a long-standing relationship in which one draws inspiration from the other. Certainly, there are bands out there who look to horror films and literature for inspiration for their art and the imagery they use. Fans of both naturally gravitate to each other like a symbiote seeking a warm and willing body.
Anthrax is hailed as part of the ‘Big Four’ of the original thrash metal explosion of the 1980s. They are the reason I got into heavy metal, the reason I picked up a guitar, and remain one of the bands from that era that have stayed with me. Their life story is one of massive highs followed by some (sometimes self-inflicted) lows.
What Anthrax have pretty much always done, especially Scott Ian, is look to literary worlds for lyrical inspiration. Among the Living owes a debt to The Stand, Skeleton in the Closet draws from Apt Pupil, and Misery Loves Company takes from Misery.
However, when they hit the studio for Persistence of Time, they wanted to leave the more jokey aspects of their sound behind and adopt a darker, more mature approach where inspiration came via real-life situations, including Ian’s own divorce. (Just for the record, this is my favourite Anthrax album, hands down.)
This change of approach also meant that they needed to change singers, convinced that the current frontman couldn’t or wouldn’t be able to go where they wanted to go.
Coming off the back of the ground-breaking tour with Public Enemy, they fired him and, in doing so, entered what would become a dark time for the band where if it could go wrong, it did. The music itself would change as they sought to stay relevant in the changing musical landscape of the 90s and in the end, they found themselves adrift, struggling with none of the credit the others in the Big four still held.
Anyway, fast-forward to 2011. Joey is back (and yes, I am skirting over a lot), and Anthrax releases their next two albums—Worship Music and For All Kings, which, for better or worse, applies a thick coat of white paint to the years 1993 to 2008 and any of the hiccups faced along the way.
The five years between Worship Music and For All Kings gave an awful lot to Ian and company to use as a backdrop to the new album, including revisiting the works of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower for the song Breathing Lightning, which has an almost happy build to it.
This makes the creeping dread of Blood Eagle Wings hit that much harder.
It is the stand-out track on here, on an album where I am the first to admit that there are a lot of songs that occupy that mid-tempo area and few flat-out ragers (with notable nods to Evil Twin and Zero Tolerance) to break things up.
Luckily, it is a stormer, and the video manages to capture that dread feeling with bursts of extreme violence and bloodletting.
Blood Eagle Wings: The Song
When I first listened to it, I wasn’t aware of the wider concept behind the song. The lyrics felt like it was more like a trip with a serial killer:
Darkness in my soul is taking hold and becomingBreak me from this hold as I unfold blood eagle wingsDarkness in my soul is taking hold and becomingBreak me from this hold as I unfold blood eagle wings…
Once I caught the video for it, it took on new meaning, and suddenly, it hit differently. Scott Ian is quoted as follows in the Rolling Stone article from March 2016 by Hank Shteamer:
“Any great city, whether it’s London, Rome, Paris, New York, LA – These cities are alive because of how many people were killed to make these cities what they are, how much blood was spilled over time.”
Using that premise, Ian crafts a tale that shows just that, that every gleaming tower of glass and steel is built on the blood and dust of those who came before.
I mentioned that the album’s tracks tended to avoid the blistering pace of their earlier output, and the arrangement of Blood Eagle Wings is not new for them—consisting of measures and chord paths that have been used on other songs. It’s one of the things that stands out to you is how often they repeated this trick and yet they manage to make it work on this that you forgive them for it.
The build does what it needs to do in terms of making the song one of the best they have ever written. It’s heavy when it needs to be, melodic as required, and gives a vehicle for Joey Belladonna to give one of his strongest vocal performances to date. It’s the sound of a band firing cohesively, and I wish that they’d been able to take that focus and apply it elsewhere on the album.
The song casts a dark shadow over the rest of the album, as the rest of the songs don’t seem to come from the same place of inspiration. Even those such as Evil Twin (about the attack on the Charlie Hebdo Satirical paper in France) aren’t as dark. Instead, the tone is positive, almost uplifting.
There is nothing positive, however, about Blood Eagle Wings. This is especially true when you start to dig into where the term originates from within Skaldic poetry as an extreme form of execution. The descriptions I’ve found online are one thing, but the physical depiction in the video is another entirely.
Blood Eagle Wings: The Video
This is an intense video, one that decides that it doesn’t need to have the band in it.
There is no dialogue; it just starts, and we are introduced to the central figure of the Skull, who looks impassively at the acts of extreme violence being carried out in his name below and seemingly without meaning. The Hero (James Duval) is trapped within this charnel house, and from the off, there is not even a hint of there being a happy ending for anyone involved. What sets this apart is just how good it looks and how it manages to translate that feeling of grime and decay.
Director James Bennett dispatches these events impassively, and immediately you think, why isn’t directing more?
There are no wasted shots, its lean, efficient and the way that the gore is handled is just top notch, it’s at a level you just don’t expect in a music video and the pay-off where all the gore is just trumped by a stunning visual of what it means to be on the receiving end of the Butcher and the Tormentor’s party special.
The video is a brilliant piece of work, built from a concept that takes in the central message of Ian’s quote and dives in headfirst of what that could look like. It’s a nightmarish view of that idea made real.
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