Sweet music videos from 'A Perfect Circle,' new CD coming Nov. 2

A Perfect Circle is popular music around here. Something appealing about being more ethereal than Tool, but just as despairing. Personally, my favorite songs are from a live concert last Halloween in San Antonio that someone taped and put on the Internet. The excellent recording shows how skillfully the group uses reverberations to build a sonic masterpiece.

With that in mind, the band has released a couple music videos to the Internet, highly critical of Bush etc. One, a deceptively simple looking cartoon-style "Counting Bodies like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums" (RealMedia & Quicktime available) features a hypnotizing Bush channeled through tons of television screens. Beautiful imagery.

A more disturbing video, "Imagine" covers the John Lennon classic (RealMedia only, sorry) in the most scathing way possible, subverting the happy happy joy joy stuff with unfiltered images of the horror of war.

On Election Day, A Perfect Circle is releasing their next album, eMOTIVe, about "WAR, PEACE LOVE AND GREED," according to their website, which has all kinds of goodies, including more tracks from the album, for free. The album art for this one looks excellent: a battered concrete peace sign in the foreground, torched city in the back. What more do you want?

Crucial:

With your halo slippin' down,
I'm more than just a little bit curious
How you plan to go about making your amends
To the dead

-- A Perfect Circle, The Noose