Maybe I'm not like most people when it comes to music DVD's, but I'm a firm believer in a few basic tenets that I feel very strongly about. 1. Live footage = boring: If you weren't there to see it for yourself, chances are it's not going to transfer well to video. Sure, there are rare circumstances where a certain level of intensity or musicianship is captured, but it's still just not the same. 2. Interviews = pretty cool: I don't know, on-camera interviews often seem more interesting to me than written interviews, go figure. 3. Behind the scenes footage = gold: If I could wave my magic wand, all music DVD's would be nothing but random behind the scenes footage, be it from the recording studio, from tour, whatever. That shit's where it's at. That being said, this is an okay DVD that falls mainly into category 1, since the vast majority of its nearly three-hour running time is live footage of a slew of bands from the festival. I think it rules that the DVD is so long, but there's no way in hell I could ever watch this thing in one sitting even if I thought all of the bands were awesome, which they're not. It's a fairly even mix of great bands, good bands, and sucky bands. The best? Most Precious Blood, Opeth, Shai Hulud, The Haunted, Lamb of God, and Darkest Hour. Most Precious Blood and Lamb of God had memorable interview footage as well as live performances, Shai Hulud's mix was mostly vocals but still totally energetic, and Mikael ?kerfeldt's vocals sounded superb during Opeth's song. The good? Shadows Fall, Nevermore, Nora, Converge, Lacuna Coil, Meshuggah, and Killswitch Engage. I was surprised to see Lacuna Coil included, and their live show was sort of hard to deal with visually, but they still sounded alright. Converge and Nora seemed a little off to me, but definitely better than a lot of the other crap cluttering this thing up. Which brings us to the worst? Unearth, Cannae, Eighteen Visions, Bleeding Through, Atreyu, Scarlet, On Broken Wings, To the Grave, Himsa, etc. I will say this: I hate Bleeding Through musically, but they sounded a lot better live than they do on record, and their interview was fucking awesome because it was both humorous and sincere, so they definitely seem like stand up people even though I can't tolerate their music so much. Eighteen Visions made me want to wretch, Atreyu was atrocious, Scarlet was fashionably horrible, I had to skip Unearth's song (even though they seemed like funny dudes), and the rest was just boring junk that I see no real value in having been included here. As far as the setup, most every band (sans Opeth and the bands that are included as extras) has a brief snippet of interview footage before their contributions to the DVD, and pretty much everything is shot in full color with great picture quality and far better than average sound. Most of the extras have rougher sound, but still pretty damn good considering. The extras are all standalones, so you can't play them straight through, which is sort of annoying, but whatever. The packaging is an abomination on this fucker, too. I don't know what they were thinking but the cover is a total piece of crap. Embarrassing, in fact. But the actual menus and all that shit on the DVD look slick and it's easy to navigate. If you like these bands and have no quarrels watching live footage, you might be into it depending on the price. I would've much rather seen a stronger focus on interviews and other behind the scenes footage (of which there really was none), but that's life. Not bad. In some ways I was hoping for more, but realistically speaking this is better than most such projects would probably turn out.
[Trustkill]
Running time - 2:45:00 (approximately), Tracks: 27
[Notable tracks: Most Precious Blood, Opeth, Shai Hulud, The Haunted, Lamb of God, Darkest Hour]
Trustkill Records - http://www.trustkill.com
