"Don't you think this would be a great video to edit pineapples into?" asked Richard as he opened Stratovarius' video of "Hunting High and Low". He is clearly mad, but I could see his point in a bizarre sort of way. (It would take too long to explain.)

It wouldn't be the first time that he's ventured in to video production, either - recently, he and a group of friends put together a music video for Dragonforce's "Fury of the Storm", with them with their faces painted and wielding plastic weapons, interspersed with shots of other random nonsense. It's entitled "Fury of the Grünt", complete with heavy metal umlaut, and I won't put it up here because it would hurt my dialup connection and your sanity.

I am immensely impressed, though, with the recognisability that Dragonforce have gained. They haven't been an absolute favourite of mine, but they're decent enough, and now it seems that they're very popular with the in-crowd, a couple of years after their first album came out on Noise Records. I hope, though, that their becoming more popular doesn't put me off them. Like I mentioned a couple of months ago in that gigantic article that you didn't read, it seems that the more popular a band becomes the less likable it is to people who knew them when they weren't. Even though I can feel this happening, I'm going to try and stop thinking like that because it's immensely silly. It is, at least, a step forward for the recognisability of the music I like. Now all we need is for Sonata Arctica to do the same.

Iron Maiden in "decent artwork" shock!

It came as a surprise to me yesterday to find out that Iron Maiden had recently released a new album. Called "Death on the Road", it's a live release, so it's not as big news as it could be, but it still made me realise how little I'd been keeping up with them. I was near-fanatical about them in school, but let my interest in them slip when I discovered that many other bands in Europe were more than competent at imitating and surpassing their style. They now seem to be rather repetitive and uninspired to me, because Steve Harris lost the ability to write choruses around the time when he wrote The Angel and the Gambler (ten minutes of song with roughly three minutes of content).

I've never really appreciated live albums that much, because they seem to be rather a contradiction in terms to me - seeing a band live is about seeing them live, and I like the neater sound of music when it's recorded and produced. Nevertheless, what strikes me about this release is that shockingly, it has decent cover artwork. Iron Maiden have had a problem with this ever since Derek Riggs got fed up of them, and have since had an appallingly tatty piece that looks like an old Megadrive game and an episode of Reboot gone badly wrong. But with this one I think things are looking a lot better - they've even got the obligatory Eddie reference in, and the pun in the title (continuing their track record with "Live after Death" and "Maiden Japan").