Every once in a while a video surfaces as I’m trawling the blogs that is just so perfect, so visually stunning, and so tightly edited that I can’t help but bump it to the front of my Sunday Music Video Review queue- and this is one of those videos

. It’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “East Hastings”- minus the street preacher intro- and set to some great high-def footage of the abandoned Six Flags theme park in New Orleans. It’s amazing to me that a place can look like this going on five years after Hurricane Katrina hit:

The Music: Not much to do here but thank Adam for getting me into Godspeed a few years ago and link to his groovy review of F#A#∞, which is the album where “East Hastings” can be found. I’ll add that Godspeed You! Black Emperor is coming to town in March for any MT readers in the Washington DC area, and that personally I’m planning on giving up an arm and naming my firstborn child Efrim to be able to get tickets when they go on sale in February for this once-in-a-lifetime concert. Here’s what I could find of their 2011 North American tour schedule:

02/16 – Vancouver, BC @ Vogue Theatre
02/17 – Seattle, WA @ Showbox at the Market
02/18 – Portland, OR @ Crystal Ballroom
02/20 – San Francisco, CA @ Great American Music Hall
02/21 – San Francisco, CA @ Great American Music Hall
02/23 – Los Angeles, CA @ Music Box at the Henry Fonda
03/16 – Brooklyn, NY @ Masonic Temple
03/17 – New York, NY @ Church of St. Paul the Apostle
03/19 – Philadelphia, PA @ Trocadero
03/20 – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
03/22 – Athens, GA @ 40 Watt Club
03/24 – Nashville, TN @ Cannery Ballroom
03/26 – Chicago, IL @ Metro
03/27 – Chicago, IL @ Metro
03/29 – Detroit, MI @ Majestic Theatre

The Video: I’m a huge fan of both urban exploring and professional videography. Combine both of those and set the finished product to Godspeed and there’s really no way I won’t (a) find it online and (b) like it. So that means that even when this video was pulled from Youtube by it’s original poster (I assume a very ironic copyright claim by Godspeed’s anti-capitalist, anti-corporatist label Constellation was involved), I found another version. Ahhh, that’s the great thing about the Internet, right? It’s a neverending cascade of cats that can never be put back into their respective bags.

Anyway, the cinematography goin’ on here is excellent- I’m seeing a lot of dolly or steadycam moves and a wide variety of focal lengths and I have no idea how long this bad boy took to film but I’m guessing it was a multiple day shoot. It all adds up to one very creepy, Chernobyl-esque video- perfect in every way for a post-rock soundtrack.

I’m really glad that some dude named Teddy shot this video and put it all together before the park is scheduled to be demolished in January. And I’m also really glad that some other unnamed dude ripped the Youtube stream and re-uploaded the vid when it got taken down. It’s not so much that I hate record companies for making copyright claims less, it’s that

I love making and sharing sweet-ass music videos more. So thanks, dudes, here’s to you both.