Drive east on Fort Union Boulevard from Salt Lake City, and just before the road is swallowed by the immensity of the Wasatch Range, you’ll find Alpha Coffee. It’s the last pit stop before you reach the foothills of the mightiest mountains in Utah – and if you’re thinking of taming them, or skiing them, or even rolling through, you might do well to begin your adventure with a cup of their brew. And if you were lucky enough to visit Alpha on the right day this year, you’d have found the state’s finest rap-metal band rocking the main room, shooting a clip for “Avengers”, the lead track on their ferocious Invincible album. The music of Andrew W. Boss has much in common with the coffee at Alpha: it’s invigorating, it’s served piping hot, and it tends to make those who experience it feel like the tallest peaks in the Rockies are no great obstacle to hurdle.
Boss and his bandmates strongly support Alpha’s mission. The coffeehouse was founded by veterans, and though they’re demobilized now, they haven’t forgotten where they came from or the challenges their brethren have to face. Alpha has sent thousands of dollars – and thousands of bags of coffee – to active military personnel. In Robert Eddowes’s kinetic clip for “Avengers”, we watch Alpha staff pack the good stuff in cardboard boxes for shipment overseas. As workers at the coffee shop prepare their donation for the troops, Andrew W. Boss and his band blast out the rapid-fire verses and muscular choruses to “Avengers”, pointedly waving an American flag as they do.