Review: Darkest Hour “Party Scars and Prison Bars - A Thrashography” DVD

In my opinion not many bands seem to know what to do in order to make a DVD entertaining, unfortunately. But thankfully Darkest Hour is one of those bands that does, as rather than putting out a DVD full of boring live footage with half decent audio/video quality they've opted to mix things up with live shots, music videos, interviews, documentary styled footage from way back when, and plenty of random tour material that makes for a pretty amusing watch. Everything's basically cut together in one piece, with no real rhyme or reason other than a loosely chronological flow that kind of looks back on the band's early days, how the current lineup came together, etc. Amongst some of the rarer footage is a snippet from the band's first show way back in high school when they were a bad third-rate NYHC metalcore mosh type of band or something (from which time only guitarist Mike Schleibaum and vocalist John Henry have remained). Also blowing me away was the fact that they tossed in some footage of drummer Ryan Parrish and guitarist Kris Norris from their very first band back together back in 1993, along with some old shots of bassist Paul Burnette's days with the awesome Crackhead (quite possibly one of the best and most insane/amusing live bands ever). Then there's interview footage interspersed with all of the other antics, talking about the history of Darkest Hour, former band members, their stint on Ozzfest, getting arrested, and plenty of tales of the band's apparently infamous reputation as heavy drinkers and hard partiers. The video for "The Sadist Nation" is thrown in as well, with studio audio set to live footage in both black and white and color (it all looks quite pro); with some "unofficial" yet similar (though less slick) music video types of montages for "Marching to the Killing Rhythm", "An Epitaph", and "For the Soul of the Savior" thrown in throughout. This main feature is just over an hour in running time, with about 30 minutes of bonus material tacked on. Most of the added extras are brief deleted scenes or uncut interviews with the band's friends and touring buddies (soundmen, roadies, merch dudes, etc.), adding more amusing anecdotes from tour and all that jazz. Then there's a 10-minute photo gallery from the band's entire world tour, as well as a shit-talking audio commentary added to the main feature. So overall you get about 90 minutes of content, and while not the greatest thing in the world, it's pretty entertaining - more so than a lot of the music DVD's I encounter, and definitely more so than it would've been if it was mostly live footage from various shows or whatever. Hell, I actually wish the damn thing was longer - you just can't go wrong with random backstage/tour footage. Seriously, for some reason no matter how mundane or silly that stuff is, it's just entertaining shit. This is a good one in the end, though. It doesn't drag on but it's not too skimpy either, so you get just enough bang for your $10 or $12 bucks or whatever.