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Mercyful Fate - "The Uninvited Guest" (video)

Mercyful Fate – “The Uninvited Guest” (official video)

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In honor of tomorrow’s 15th birthday of Mercyful Fate’s Into the Unknown, here’s the video for “The Uninvited Guest”.

It’s pretty bad, even for a metal video. It has that telltale ’90s “ground rushing below” effect, and the editing in general is super-cheesy. Only a fraction of the video seems related to the song’s story of a mysterious house guest that’s the ghost of a recently deceased occupant. This is all a shame, since it looks like the video had an actual budget.

But no video with King Diamond in it is boring. I could watch mediocre King Diamond/Mercyful Fate videos all day. In fact, I’m going to do just that after I put up this post. Evidently Metal Blade has been uploading classic videos from its archives to YouTube. I eagerly await more crappy KD/MF videos.

And, damn, this video reminds me of how hard In Solitude bite Mercyful Fate’s vibe. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I like the In Solitude record well enough, and their upcoming tour with Down (dates) should be, well, interesting.

But the real thing is still the best thing. Into the Unknown holds up well after 15 years. For ’90s Fate, my favorites are In the Shadows and Time, but this record, ugly artwork and all (it looks like something I’d slap together for a blog post), is a fine example of heavy metal by master craftsmen. (I’m a big fan of the last song, “Kutulu (The Mad Arab Part Two)”.) Wikipedia says that it spent two weeks in the Finnish top 40. What???

— Cosmo Lee

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BUY INTO THE UNKNOWN

Amazon (CD)
Amazon (MP3)
Metal Blade (CD)

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