German prog metallers recently released an official video for the song "Tears Of Today", taken from their new concept album Specters On Parade (see below). Speaking with BraveWords, vocalist / founder Max Chemnitz discussed the band's future plans for more video releases from what is widely regarded as the strongest album of their career.

Chemnitz: "If you don't have a label or a producer that can help you, if you don't have these marketing ideas separate from the vision of the art, it's tough to make those decisions. What song should we make a video for? There is not always an obvious answer to that question, but there are three songs on Specters On Parade that we decided to focus on for making videos. We did a lyric video for 'The Solitary Ghost', there is the official video for 'Tears Of Today', and we will make a video for 'We All Belong To The Dark'. That's going to be the big one because we have to tell the story (concept) of the album with it." 

"'We All Belong To The Dark' was actually easy to choose because it's catchy and good material for a single, but how do we present the story with this song? There was the suggestion that we film ourselves playing in a church. Great idea, but we have to get permission to play in a church.... so we'll have to put that idea aside for now (laughs). We do have a director - the same guy who shot 'Tears Of Today' - and we do have some storyboards although they are undefined, so hopefully we can get it done before the end of the year."

M.I.GOD. have been kicking around for close to 20 years, releasing albums as time and resources allow, earning themselves a small but respectable following along the way. The international market was never the focus so there was never a serious push in that direction, but after the release of the Floor 29 album in 2012 things went quiet, messing up any forward momentum they may have had. This year the band returned with Specters On Parade, an album unlike anything in the M.I.GOD. catalogue. Meant as a concept record, reviews have been all over the map, with one reviewer going so far as to simply call the album “shit.” The band good-naturedly shared said small-minded review via social media, knowing full well that no matter how poorly some people react to Specters On Parade, it is most certainly not the slab of crap they would have you believe.

In actual fact, Specters On Parade is the best album M.I.GOD. has released to date and it’s worthy of international attention. It plays out like a movie, taking the listener on a journey in the same way a film soundtrack offers up an act-to-act or scene-by-scene tapestry.

“I’m a really big movie fan,” says Chemnitz, “which I think is pretty obvious when you listen to Specters On Parade, and that’s how I laid it out. I had no idea how to make a concept album; I just had an idea, I guess you could say, in the context of making a movie. The main thing was that I had a running order for the songs, like a setlist. In my mind it was fixed. But, that idea was created before I had the lyrics (laughs). I only had the music for 10 songs, and I had to put them in order to tell the story, I guess you can say. For example, I wanted to end the album with a really big song, ‘Specters On Parade’, but as I wrote the lyrics that song became the central topic and I had to move it up to the middle of the tracklist. And when I was writing the songs, I realized I would have to make time jumps between them to make the concept move forward, to show that a few months had passed or whatever. That’s why we put the little scenes between the songs.”

For Chemnitz, having Specters On Parade lumped in with metal royalty like Savatage’s Streets, Queensrÿche’s Operation: Mindcrime, Dream Theater’s Scenes From A Memory or even Extreme’s Pornograffitti is an accolade of the highest order.

“It leaves me speechless, really. It’s the biggest thing I could wish for because I love those albums, like Operation: Mindcrime, and I still listen to them. I’m really grateful when I hear things like that.”

Read the complete interview here. Check out the BraveWords review for Specters On Parade here.

For information on M.I.GOD. go to this location.