Monday, April 21, 2008

Buy This Video Immediately

WARNING: Positivity below. If you're here for unbridled sarcasm and cynicism, check back tomorrow. Or any other day, actually.



If you don't believe anything else I say ever, believe this: You're not going to see a better BMX video than Dead Bang this year. I promise. No, it's not filmed in hi-def, they didn't fly the entire team to Mars to ride street, they didn't train squirrels to spell out each rider's name before the start of their respective sections, there are no sped-up shots of cloud formations, and you won't have to watch any bangers in sl0-mo to figure out that not only was it a tailwhip, it was a switch-footed switch tailwhip—OPPOSITE!

What they DID do is put together a classic no-holds-barred video which could have just as easily have been named To Flat. Albie Bennett, Jimmy LeVan, Alex Liiv (below, stolen from the Metal site) and Sean Burns (especially Sean Burns) try to constantly out-daveyoung each other, sending it down bigger and bigger stairsets and gaps with either no run-up, no run-out, or both, ending in long skids that often put them into a curb, a wall, or large body of water.

(The only part I didn't understand was Chris Wilson's. It's not that he's a bad rider or anything, he just didn't fit. The only tailwhips in the video occur during his section, and in a video like this it's just jarring, like a drum'n'bass song on a Stooges record. If possible, Metal should trade Wilson to S&M for Stricker. Also missed are Ryan Metro, Dan Price and Mike Lausman.)

Anyway, yes. Leather jackets, 45-tooth sprockets and 48-spoke wheels. Dead Bang is a video made by people who grew up watching Evel Knievel, not Travis Pastrana. (Hardly anyone ever takes a hand off their bars or a foot off their pedals.) It's everything you thought BMX was when you were 10, only turned up to 11. Crashes appear fatal, bikes and riders blow up with regularity, death is defied again and again and again.

Buy it now. Watch it often.


7 comments:

Anonymous said...

well put... Jimmy and his cast of leather clad stair jumpers are exactly what is missing in BMX nowadays to a large extent.

Anonymous said...

Also see Cam Wood in the 5050 video.

Anonymous said...

I need to get a leather jacket.

CMcMahon said...

I so fucking concur with you, NER. Well worth the cash.

Anonymous said...

i really would like to see this video. it'll be better than all of the stupid one foot ledge work that adam grandmaison blows his load over. ride like a man.

but cinematic videos look good and have their place too.

Boston George said...

off the map 2 is comming out soon...and alot of burns and albies stuff was saved for that video... trust me... its going to fucking wild too.

dead bang is bmx.

Anonymous said...

"It's everything you thought BMX was when you were 10, only turned up to 11."

fantastic!!