Michael Shannon Stars In The New Local H Video

Michael Shannon Stars In The New Local H Video

The Illinois alt-rock band Local H has been around for basically forever. They had some success in the ’90s, scoring a modern-rock radio hit with 1996’s “Bound For The Floor” and releasing the well-regarded As Good As Dead that same year. And they’ve kept going ever since, releasing a long string of solid and underrated independent rock albums and playing live shows that, from what I’ve heard, are consistently pretty great. They have soldiered on. And now they’ve got a music video with a two-time Oscar nominee in it.

It’s not immediately clear why Michael Shannon, the famously intense and big-headed character actor, stars in Local H’s new video for “Innocents.” But Shannon grew up partially in Chicago, and he was a stage actor there for a while. In his spare time, Shannon leads a Chicago rock band called Corporal, and some cursory internet research tells me that Corporal has played at least one show with the Local H side project Scott Lucas & The Married Men. (Given locations, there are probably a lot more cases of Shannon playing with Local H, but I just found the one.) So this could just be a famous actor remembering where he came from and working with some old friends.

In any case, director Felix Piñeiro’s video shows Shannon as a motorcycle mechanic who heads off to a bar where he meets a whole lot of people in freaky costumes. He lets off some steam in the moshpit and eventually goes into party-animal mode, even breaking that scowl after a while. The song is a six-minute churn that you will probably enjoy if you have any lingering affection for ’90s-style radio-rock. Check it out below.

If Man Of Steel had a few scenes of Drunk General Zod that looked a bit like this, the DC Cinematic Universe might be in a better place now. Just saying.

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