Stockholm based quartet STERBHAUS who deals in Metal Deluxe released a new video for the song “Bloodbarf” on the 23rd of October in conjunction with their delayed releasegig with “Grave and Raise Hell” in Stockholm. The video is as extraordinary, inventive and entertaining as always referring to STERBHAUS past video outputs but this time it is currently banned in several forums and most prominently for Facebook promotion due to it being considered explicit.
STERBHAUS is rather bewildered by this response as the video portrays – although some gore and a lot of real animal blood – an unusually positive and sweet approach to a suicide sect which in order to obtain their goal of ascension devours their great object of affection and worship (a character who also clearly approves of this undertaking). The video is a feature with higher budget than usual and a third time result of the hugely successful collaboration with filmmaker Martin Strandberg (Sabaton, Shining, Snowy Shaw) who is also responsible for the previous artsy Ingemar Bergman inspired video “Crossed and Pissed and Devoured” (also from the new album “New Level of Malevolence on Black Lodge/Sound Pollution) and the popular humoristic and bizarre video for “Absolutely Do Not Die!”.
As a side-result of the “Bloodbarf” video being banned STERBHAUS are currently also banned for promoting earlier efforts as the extremely rigid Facebook rules seem to always find some very small detail in any backcatalogue material to label it explicit. Texts in biographies or previously mentioned songtitles for other videos for instance and just mentioning the title of “Bloodbarf” while excluding links to the video is also forbidden.
STERBHAUS issues the following statement:
“It is rather worrying that this is the trend today. We have an artistic and creative approach to do our stuff and since we don’t just put out another performance video or cute/cheap lyric video some people who hold the strings find they have the authority to censor unoffensive creativity. This is almost worse than the public view of Metal in the eighties and the PMRC stuff because this time around – in what we consider to be an age of free information, people absolutely Believe they are not subjected to censorship! And yet they indeed are. Sorry to disclose this, but everything everyone sees on Facebook that is not from private accounts needs to be payed for in order for You all to see it – it’s called “promoting” or “boosting”. To simply “like” a page doesn’t necessarily mean you will see the pages post in you stream. So for Sterbhaus this situation means in the end, we can’t display our art in what is unfortunately the biggest forum in social media. There is only sweetness and love portrayed in this video – albeit draped in a lot of real animal blood, but it’s gone so far that just because it contains the words “Blood” and “Barf” it may not be promoted.
It’s scary to see so much hate and bigoted opinions are being aired freely by dubious characters (maybe not promoted but shared excessively) in the aftermath of the horrors around the world – especially after what happened in Paris recently, and an up-and-coming act like Sterbhaus can’t share the craft they run themselves ragged to create. We fail to see the logic in this. Newborn Christians marauders within the ranks of top Metal and Thrash acts and pop Metal acts (often female fronted) seems to set the standard for how Metal is to be portrayed as today in order for it to be OK in major social media. When did things go so wrong? Heck – we’re not even extreme! Extreme acts seem to get their stuff thru in the underground for some reason just because they’re just over the top with putting morals aside. But we don’t care for that either as we really don’t see what we do as offensive but instead just as valid as the past huge arena acts of the eighties when it comes to image or how we portray what we do. We can just hope the Metal realm will watch all this folly unfurl and rise even stronger in the end because of it… having learned a lesson or two. We shouldn’t let mainstream social media decide what we should listen to”.
The video for “Bloodbarf” can be seen at the following links:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ5P_UwOtII
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/141905968
http://www.sterbhaus.com
http://www.facebook.com/sterbhaus
http://www.twitter.com/sterbhaus
