Creed: Live (DC3 Global) RIYL: The sound of dogs being murdered underwater, Nickelback
Alter Bridge Live In Amsterdam (DC3 Global) RIYL: Seether, 3 Doors Down, Daughtry
Remember Creed? Yeah, me too. In fact I’m still in the support group. Their reunion tour was the first in an unholy trinity of ’90s reunion announcements (the other two being Blink-182 and Limp Bizkit), and this live DVD captures the band’s Second Coming in all its horror. It’s been a few years, but Creed still sounds like Creed, a plodding combination of Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam and every mid-’90s Christian rock band you never heard. However, the downtime has not been kind to singer Scott Stapp; he can’t hit the notes like he used to, and is frequently flat and out of tune. However, Stapp never sounded all that great to begin with, so you might not notice. What you will notice is that he looks horrible. Easily 20-30 pounds heavier, and before the end of the third song, the man is just drenched in sweat. He doesn’t look fat (hell, he’s thinner than I am, so I’m not one to talk), but he looks unhealthy as hell, as if he needs a tank of oxygen and an adrenaline shot at any minute or he’ll keel over the second he stops his guttural whaling. Behind him the rest of the band just seems like they’re going through the motions, dealing with a frontman they’ve long tired of. Stapp’s lack of endurance means that he takes frequent breaks between songs to talk to the audience and at one point proclaims that “You can change your legacy and destiny, man.” And that may be true, but this DVD sure as hell won’t do it. Hell, even if you liked Creed back in “the day” (the day being the late-’90s/early-’00s) you won’t want to hear/see this incarnation of them. This is a horrible excuse for a concert video and is even below the low standards that Creed fans undoubtedly have.
When Creed got back together, the future of Alter Bridge, the band made up of everyone from Creed except Stapp (with Myles Kennedy replacing him), was immediately called into question. However, they let everyone know right away that they weren’t going anywhere no matter how successful the Creed reunion turned out to be, and after watching their “Live in Amsterdam” DVD, it’s easy to see why. They actually like being in this band. Say what you will about Alter Bridge – they certainly aren’t original and at their best they’re just slightly above average, but their brand of classic rock redux is light years above anything Creed ever put out. And the band seems to know it, as they happily strut around stage, play to the crowd and just seem to have a good time. One can assume that Kennedy is to thank for this; he is a great front man with boundless energy and enthusiasm and he even seems to like his bandmates. And while the songs he’s singing may not always be great, he can sure as hell sing. So, Alter Bridge is a great live band, but their songs are not – and that’s a bit of a bummer. Still, if you like Alter Bridge this is a must-buy, as it showcases a band at the top of its game, happy to perform and happy to be with a lead singer who isn’t a pompous, bloated has-been who’s more suited to front a Meatloaf tribute act.
RIYL: Ministry, Gary Numan, free stuff you can watch on YouTube
If you want some good weed and some killer tie-dye shirts, you talk to Grateful Dead fans, but if you want state of the art A/V work (and maybe some anti-depressants), you go to Nine Inch Nails fans. Last year Trent Reznor let over 400 GB of HD footage from his Lights in the Sky tour “leak” onto torrent sites, apparently after he was unable to release an official DVD with the footage. Over the past year, various NIN fans around the world have been working on the footage, editing, color-correcting and even subtitling it for an “unofficial” release over the internet. That release, dubbed “Another Version of the Truth” finally made its way online, and it was definitely worth the wait.
The Lights in the Sky tour was Nine Inch Nails’ most ambitious yet, a choreographed spectacle that lived up to its name, thanks to multiple LED screens and some of the brightest flood lights you’ll ever be blinded by. Matching the brilliant visuals was the one of Nine Inch Nails most varied set lists to date, incorporating everything from Pretty Hate Machine to The Slip, even including a surprising amount of material from the instrumental Ghosts I-IV. It was a great show – you had to be there. But if you weren’t, this DVD comes damn close to recreating the experience. The footage is edited together great, the cuts are fast when they need to be, but more often than not the edits are lax, letting us take in the performance without added distractions. Which is good, because Trent and company were on fire for this tour. For both the quiet numbers, like the material from Ghosts, or for loud boisterous explosions of noise like “Wish,” the group is tighter than ever, and their performance are made all the more impressive by the revolutionary A/V spectacle that surrounds them (literally, they had a lot of LCD screens out there). Highlights of this include “Closer,” where Trent sings directly into a camera that projects his face across the screen behind them, distorted by the soundwaves of the music, and “The Warning,” where bright displays turn the band into silhouettes.
“Another Version of the Truth” is available online for free here in a multitude of formats, including one that you can burn to a Dual Layer DVD. A Blu-Ray is apparently coming soon. No matter what format you choose however, this is a must-own for NIN fans, and the price sure as hell is right.
If you are sick of the state of the music business, if you need some new music that sounds truly new, if FM radio bores you to tears and even the blog-rock CDs showing up on every music site’s “best of” list lets you down because it all sounds like half-practiced, overproduced slacker junk played by snotty people you wouldn’t invite to parties at your place…please go and buy this box set. The culmination of the two-year Radiolarians project, The Evolutionary Set is the career pinnacle of MMW, jazz-rocking experimentalists who are neither jazz nor rock, but “avant-groove.” Kind of an thinking-fan’s instrumental Phish, this trio started with an idea in 2007: Write some proto-jams, briefly rehearse them, take them on tour, develop them live, and then record the finished project. It spawned three ridiculously tight, sometimes funky, sometimes rockin’, sometimes ambient-noodling numbers that sound like nothing you’ve heard. It doesn’t hurt that these guys not only have played together almost two decades, but that they’re exceptional players. The box set includes the three Radiolarians albums, a double-vinyl set, a DVD documentary, a remixes disc, and a live album. It’s intelligent jazz, it’s primitive rock. It’s funky stuff. It’s an updated 2009 version of the strangely beautiful Miles Davis period that included the records On The Corner and A Tribute to Jack Johnson. It’s everything indie music’s all about, and while the major labels and commercial radio won’t touch this stuff, you should. (Indirecto Records, 2009)
Always the eccentric, predictable only in his unpredictability, Robyn Hitchcock has never been an easy character to decipher, frequently defying easy accessibility and offering only rare opportunity to peer below his songs’ psychedelic sheen and to meditate on his melodies. Consequently, the concert film “I Often Dream of Trains In New York”, is a rare treasure in that it gives a more intimate view of the man and his muse via a thorough track-by-track replay of an early album many consider his signature achievement.
Hitchcock’s no stranger to cinema, of course. Last year’s documentary “Sex, Food, Death… and Insects” offered a surprisingly candid potrait of the artist in creative mode, a follow-up of sorts to the musical portrait captured in Jonathan Demme’s critically lauded “Storefront Hitchcock.” Hitchcock had a cinematic reunion with Demme more recently in fact, when he was given opportunity to perform a pair of songs in Demme’s current film, “Rachel Getting Married,” following up his acting debut as one of the protagonists in Demme’s remake of “The Manchurian Candidate.”
Regardless, it’s Hitchcock’s allure as an artist with a curious magnetism and slightly off-kilter wit and regimen that enthralls his followers, and if “I Often Dream of Trains in New York” seems to strip away that elusive veneer, it doesn’t detract from his charm or appeal. Performing in a stripped-down acoustic setting and backed by multi-instrumentalist Terry Edwards and guitarist Tim Keegan, he revels in the sentiment, sarcasm and wry irony parlayed by such numbers as “Up to Our Nex,” “I Often Dream of Trains,” “America” and “I Used to Say I Love You,” songs that take on an idyllic, folk-like serenity in this live setting. Even so, the a cappella “Uncorrected Personality Traits” brings to mind the bizarre, unabashed silliness of the Bonzo Dog Band, while a cassette recording of “Sometimes I Wish I Was a Pretty Girl” serves as ample reminder of Hitchcock’s penchant for bizarre lyrical twists. It’s fitting then that the tracks are interspersed with Hitchcock’s own commentary on the origins of these songs, relayed, appropriately, from a seat on a train. Likewise, a bonus feature, “Beyond Basingstoke” offers further illumination and enlightenment.
A must-see for all Hitchcock aficionados, “I Often Dream of Trains in New York” is also an ideal passage for the uninitiated. (Yep Roc 2009)
One of the best concert films of all time gets its hi-def due with this lovingly curated reissue “Stop Making Sense.” Directed by Jonathan Demme, “Sense” captures the Talking Heads at their squirrelly best, spasmodically jumping between new wave, funk, and arty Afro-pop with a crack band of ace sidemen that included Bernie Worrell, Alex Weir, and Lynn Mabry. The Talking Heads found their footing slowly, evolving from willfully experimental Rhode Island hipsters to a merry band of world music vagabonds, and Demme frames their journey with a stage setup that opens slowly; for the opening number, “Psycho Killer,” David Byrne comes out with nothing but his guitar and a boombox. He’s joined by bassist Tina Weymouth on the next number, they’re joined by Chris Frantz next, Jerry Harrison follows Frantz, and so on and so forth, until the whole entourage is under the lights, making the most joyously paranoid racket of the ‘80s.
The Blu-ray transfer doesn’t scrub every last scratch or speck of dust from the frame, but knowing the Talking Heads, that may very well have been intentional; in any case, it makes for fine viewing at 1080p, despite periodic minor problems with the picture, and the sound – presented here in a pair of DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mixes that let the viewer choose between the equivalent of audience and soundboard recordings – more than makes up for any visual flaws. The special features include audio commentary from the band and director (everyone’s tracks separately recorded, natch), along with other bonus content ported over from the DVD version (bonus tracks, storyboards, a few minutes of Byrne interviewing himself), plus Blu-ray exclusive footage of the 1999 press conference that reunited the band for “Stop Making Sense’s” 15th anniversary screening. There’s a short list of concert films whose contents justify a $34.99 list price, regardless of format. This is one of them. (UMVD)
Posted by Christopher Glotfelty (09/30/2009 @ 1:40 pm)
Decades removed from their break up, the Beatles are possibly busier than they’ve ever been. Almost every day, an interesting bit of news surfaces with connection to the band. Earlier this week, Lucy Vodden, the underlying inspiration for “Lucky in the Sky with Diamonds,” passed away. Four days ago, an essay written by Paul McCartney when he was 10 about the Queen was unearthed. Of course, this news pales in comparison to The Beatles: Rock Band and the remasters of their entire catalog, which were released on September 9th. It looks like Beatlemania will never end and I couldn’t be happier.
On November 23rd, Paul McCartney will release a 2CD/1DVD package of his performances from earlier this year at New York’s Citi Field. Good Evening New York will highlight each night’s 33-song set filmed with 15 high-definition cameras.
A deluxe edition will feature an additional DVD featuring McCartney’s performance at the Ed Sullivan Theater. The live album will also be issued on vinyl.
The gigs, at which McCartney played songs by The Beatles and Wings, as well as selections from his solo back catalogue, took place on July 17, 18 and 21.
They were significant for McCartney as The Beatles played the venue in 1965 when it was known as Shea Stadium.
This will be McCartney’s second release on Hear Music, which is owned by Starbucks Corporation.
RIYL: The Allman Brothers Band, Widespread Panic, The Rolling Stones
The Black Crowes hit the road in the spring of 2008 for a mini-tour that featured a nightly first set of the just-released Warpaint album being played in its entirety. This show from the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles captures the band on a hot night. Vocalist Chris Robinson has got his mojo working while then-new members Luther Dickinson (lead guitar) and Adam MacDougall are fitting right in.
Warpaint was the band’s first new studio album in eight years and the band is clearly energized. General consensus has it that the band’s new 2009 album, Before the Frost… Until the Freeze, has already surpassed Warpaint with an even stronger batch of tunes, but as drummer Steve Gorman has noted in a recent interview at Jambase.com, Warpaint was pivotal for the band in helping them regain their musical “compass.”
Tunes like “Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution” and “Evergreen” benefit from Dickinson’s charged leads and backing harmonies from Charity White and Mona Lisa Young. Guitarist Rich Robinson and drummer Gorman form the band’s backbone, laying down a Stones-meets-Zep vibe on “Wee Who See the Deep.” Solos by Dickinson and MacDougall surpass the studio performance to demonstrate why the Black Crowes have always been more about the live shows, though they generally turn out stronger and more cohesive albums than most jam bands. Dickinson moves to mandolin for the poignant “Locust Street,” with Chris Robinson pouring on the soul. As with the album, the highlight of the set is “Movin’ on Down the Line,” the first song written for the album, an uplifting psychedelic rock tour de force.
The second set is only six songs, but features stellar covers of Delaney & Bonnie Bramlett’s “Poor Elijah,” the Bramlett/Clapton gem “Don’t Know Why,” and the Stones’ “Torn and Frayed,” a tune tailor made for the Robinson Brothers harmony vocals. There’s also an extended work out on “Bad Luck Blue Eyes Goodbye.” This short but sweet second set is what elevates the DVD from three to four stars, as the band really digs in deep. (Eagle Rock Entertainment 2009)
Posted by Christopher Glotfelty (09/16/2009 @ 2:07 pm)
While fictional biopics such as “Ray” and “Walk the Line” are worth your dollar if you want to see some great acting, I prefer to watch the actual musician(s) in their element. Being relatively young, I haven’t had the chance to catch some of my favorites live, so I get very excited when live DVDs and documentaries are announced. Still, those are often hit or miss. Thankfully, some filmmakers have, over the years, utilized techniques that really “capture” a performance in ways that even being attendance can’t produce. Take Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz,” for example, or more recently, Davis Guggenheim’s “It Might Get Loud.” Neil Young is an individual who puts everything he has into his live act. This requires actual “thinking” on his part, and over the years he’s began combining different forms of art into a traditional tour date. Jonathan Demme (director of “Silence of the Lambs” and “Rachel Getting Married) has long been fascinated by the rock verteran’s otherworldly presence on stage. So far, in his planned trilogy on Young, Demm’s released “Heart of Gold,” a concert film documenting a performance shortly after the release of Young’s album “Prairie Wind.” The second installment, “Neil Young Trunk Show,” looks just as captivating.
Trunk Show is subtitled “scenes from a concert,” specifically from a pair of shows Young performed at the 1927-built Tower Theater in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, as part of his intimate Chrome Dreams II theater tour in 2008. Onstage, he performed a full acoustic set, followed by a full electric one with bandmates Ben Keith, Rick Rosas, Ralph Molina, Anthony “Sweetpea” Crawford and wife Pegi Young. He also had painter Eric Johnson creating on-the-spot works for each song. The stage was cluttered with “pre-digital” items, including a fan, DNC camera, and telephone.
Demme knew the set list, but says nothing was planned for the film. “Neil trusts me,” he says. Shot on hand-held cameras (HDCam, HDV and Super-8mm), Demme’s team included director of photography Declan Quinn (Rachel Getting Married, Leaving Las Vegas) and camera operators he’s worked with before.
Unlike the as-is sequence of Heart of Gold, for Trunk Show Demme jumbled the set list: the rare (”Mexico,” “Kansas,” “The Sultan”), the classics (”Cinnamon Girl,” “Cowgirl in the Sand,” “After the Gold Rush,” “Like a Hurricane”) and more recent (”No Hidden Path,” “The Believer”), and interspersed a few offstage moments to “ventilate the visuals” from the “claustrophobic indoors on the stage.” Those included Young’s entry to the Tower from a garbage-filled alley and the removal of a hangnail in his dressing room “He is completely unvain,” says Demme.
“Neil Young Trunk Show” will run at the Woodstock Film Festival but a nationwide release date hasn’t been announced. He’s one of the few “older guys” I really want to see live. Hopefully this film comes out soon to tide me over.
Ah, now that’s more like it. The CD that Eagle issued last year of the Moody Blues’ performance at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival was nice, but seeing the band in action makes a world of difference. Even better, they have rounded up four-fifths of the band for present-day interviews (flautist Ray Thomas retired in 2002) to discuss the show, and keyboardist Mike Pinder dusts off the Mellotron he played at the Isle of Wight show and gives a demonstration. (To give you kids some perspective on the unpredictability of the Mellotron, it’s a keyboard that literally plays loops of tape. Using one in a live show was gutsy, to say the least.) The DVD does not contain the full set that appears on the CD, but the big hits (”Tuesday Afternoon,” “Question,” “Nights in White Satin”) are all here, along with a montage of dozens of performances of “Ride My See Saw,” both in concert and for various television specials. The most amusing aspect of watching the band play live is how restricted singer/guitarist Justin Hayward and bassist John Lodge’s movements were by their gear; the cords that went from their guitars to the speakers were about five feet long. (Eagle Vision)
Remember Creed? Yeah, me too. In fact I’m still in the support group. Their reunion tour was the first in an unholy trinity of ’90s reunion announcements (the other two being Blink-182 and Limp Bizkit), and this live DVD captures the band’s Second Coming in all its horror. It’s been a few years, but Creed still sounds like Creed, a plodding combination of Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam and every mid-’90s Christian rock band you never heard. However, the downtime has not been kind to singer Scott Stapp; he can’t hit the notes like he used to, and is frequently flat and out of tune. However, Stapp never sounded all that great to begin with, so you might not notice. What you will notice is that he looks horrible. Easily 20-30 pounds heavier, and before the end of the third song, the man is just drenched in sweat. He doesn’t look fat (hell, he’s thinner than I am, so I’m not one to talk), but he looks unhealthy as hell, as if he needs a tank of oxygen and an adrenaline shot at any minute or he’ll keel over the second he stops his guttural whaling. Behind him the rest of the band just seems like they’re going through the motions, dealing with a frontman they’ve long tired of. Stapp’s lack of endurance means that he takes frequent breaks between songs to talk to the audience and at one point proclaims that “You can change your legacy and destiny, man.” And that may be true, but this DVD sure as hell won’t do it. Hell, even if you liked Creed back in “the day” (the day being the late-’90s/early-’00s) you won’t want to hear/see this incarnation of them. This is a horrible excuse for a concert video and is even below the low standards that Creed fans undoubtedly have.
When Creed got back together, the future of Alter Bridge, the band made up of everyone from Creed except Stapp (with Myles Kennedy replacing him), was immediately called into question. However, they let everyone know right away that they weren’t going anywhere no matter how successful the Creed reunion turned out to be, and after watching their “Live in Amsterdam” DVD, it’s easy to see why. They actually like being in this band. Say what you will about Alter Bridge – they certainly aren’t original and at their best they’re just slightly above average, but their brand of classic rock redux is light years above anything Creed ever put out. And the band seems to know it, as they happily strut around stage, play to the crowd and just seem to have a good time. One can assume that Kennedy is to thank for this; he is a great front man with boundless energy and enthusiasm and he even seems to like his bandmates. And while the songs he’s singing may not always be great, he can sure as hell sing. So, Alter Bridge is a great live band, but their songs are not – and that’s a bit of a bummer. Still, if you like Alter Bridge this is a must-buy, as it showcases a band at the top of its game, happy to perform and happy to be with a lead singer who isn’t a pompous, bloated has-been who’s more suited to front a Meatloaf tribute act.
If you want some good weed and some killer tie-dye shirts, you talk to Grateful Dead fans, but if you want state of the art A/V work (and maybe some anti-depressants), you go to Nine Inch Nails fans. Last year Trent Reznor let over 400 GB of HD footage from his Lights in the Sky tour “leak” onto torrent sites, apparently after he was unable to release an official DVD with the footage. Over the past year, various NIN fans around the world have been working on the footage, editing, color-correcting and even subtitling it for an “unofficial” release over the internet. That release, dubbed “Another Version of the Truth” finally made its way online, and it was definitely worth the wait. 
If you are sick of the state of the music business, if you need some new music that sounds truly new, if FM radio bores you to tears and even the blog-rock CDs showing up on every music site’s “best of” list lets you down because it all sounds like half-practiced, overproduced slacker junk played by snotty people you wouldn’t invite to parties at your place…please go and buy this box set. The culmination of the two-year Radiolarians project, The Evolutionary Set is the career pinnacle of MMW, jazz-rocking experimentalists who are neither jazz nor rock, but “avant-groove.” Kind of an thinking-fan’s instrumental Phish, this trio started with an idea in 2007: Write some proto-jams, briefly rehearse them, take them on tour, develop them live, and then record the finished project. It spawned three ridiculously tight, sometimes funky, sometimes rockin’, sometimes ambient-noodling numbers that sound like nothing you’ve heard. It doesn’t hurt that these guys not only have played together almost two decades, but that they’re exceptional players. The box set includes the three Radiolarians albums, a double-vinyl set, a DVD documentary, a remixes disc, and a live album. It’s intelligent jazz, it’s primitive rock. It’s funky stuff. It’s an updated 2009 version of the strangely beautiful Miles Davis period that included the records On The Corner and A Tribute to Jack Johnson. It’s everything indie music’s all about, and while the major labels and commercial radio won’t touch this stuff, you should. (Indirecto Records, 2009)
Always the eccentric, predictable only in his unpredictability, Robyn Hitchcock has never been an easy character to decipher, frequently defying easy accessibility and offering only rare opportunity to peer below his songs’ psychedelic sheen and to meditate on his melodies. Consequently, the concert film “I Often Dream of Trains In New York”, is a rare treasure in that it gives a more intimate view of the man and his muse via a thorough track-by-track replay of an early album many consider his signature achievement.
One of the best concert films of all time gets its hi-def due with this lovingly curated reissue “Stop Making Sense.” Directed by Jonathan Demme, “Sense” captures the Talking Heads at their squirrelly best, spasmodically jumping between new wave, funk, and arty Afro-pop with a crack band of ace sidemen that included Bernie Worrell, Alex Weir, and Lynn Mabry. The Talking Heads found their footing slowly, evolving from willfully experimental Rhode Island hipsters to a merry band of world music vagabonds, and Demme frames their journey with a stage setup that opens slowly; for the opening number, “Psycho Killer,” David Byrne comes out with nothing but his guitar and a boombox. He’s joined by bassist Tina Weymouth on the next number, they’re joined by Chris Frantz next, Jerry Harrison follows Frantz, and so on and so forth, until the whole entourage is under the lights, making the most joyously paranoid racket of the ‘80s.
