The grainy black-and-white imagery in The Bravery’s new video is meant to disturb. A smudge of spotlight allows glimpses of a scantily-clad woman — a flash of her legs and gas mask-covered face, a pale arm drawing a bath that fills with inky water, hands mixing noxious cocktails into clear plastic party cups, cracking eggs and sprinkling salt and garnishing each one with a little mermaid before pouring her voodoo cocktails out the window and into the bathtub.
The same smudge of light shows glimpses of various band members rocking out and falls on the unshaven face of frontman Sam Endicott, his blank-eyed stare a stark contrast to anguished singing and probing lyrics: “If I put my hands around your wrists, would you fight them? / If I put my fingers in your mouth, would you bite them? / So many things that I would do / If I had my way with you…”
A man wearing a devil mask with a cruel black smile leads the woman through a door and into the next scene, and the two begin taking off each others’ clothes, pressing their ugly masked faces together in an dreadful imitation of a kiss, and engaging in a grotesque sort of sexual foreplay. He pushes her onto a bed to the driving chorus: “And there will be no tenderness / No tenderness / There will be no tenderness / No tenderness / I will show no mercy for you / You have no mercy for me / The only thing that I ask / Love me mercilessly.”
This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2009.