Search - Underworld Live - Everything Everything on DVD

Insipring = the calling card of the band

sikkboyy | not from Romford :( | 07/31/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Underworld has gone through their entire career by doing things their way. They brought on JBO (Junior Boys Own) instead of letting a record company boss them around. They don't do the typically accepted 4-minutes-and-done tracks. They helped found Tomato, the London based design company that does the visuals for their shows (and this DVD). They just love doing things their way, which is really refreshing since it seems a lot of music artists out there are handicapped by management that tries to point them down a certain path rather than let the art come out in its purest form.So Underworld set on the task of creating this experience, smack dab in the middle of touring for an album they had just released (Beaucoup Fish). It's amazing how well they captured the concert experience (in addition to enhancing it with visuals and effects melded on top of the concert footage), and the angles were worked well to provide the viewer with better than front row perception...footage was taken from the front, the back, the sides, from the depths of the crazed crowd, from the stage, and so forth, so the viewer can experience not only what the show was like, but the venue and the crowd as well to better serve the experience as a whole.The songs themselves are pretty much a collection of greatest hits, minus an odd one here and there such as "Darktrain." Whereas Rick Smith is basically 99% of the studio work, vocalist Karl Hyde is the focal point for the audience for the live shows, and Hyde puts out the most incredible energy at every show (as though it were to be his first and last performance). the music itself shouldn't be cheapened by pigeonholing it into a certain category, be it techno, trance...whatever. The beats are for dancing and the vocals are for thinking. Deciphering Underworld lyrics, which have intentionally never been fully published, is like trying to figure out a rubix cube, but what's wonderful about them is they are very thought suggestive in the regard that following them may trigger images or past experiences that YOU'VE had, rather than hear tales of what happened to the singer or the band.This DVD can be played showing concert + visual footage combined, or just the visuals + music, along with 2 extra tracks "Kittens" and "Rowla" which don't have the benefit of having liv concert footage to go along with them. There is also an out-takes session, where some of the clips that made it onto the DVD and some that weren't being pieced together along with audio clips from the performances being heard in the echo-ey fashion that you'd hear if you were actually towards the back of the performance itself.There are also features for your computer, provided you have a DVD drive, that sadly I haven't seen because I don't own the necessary equipment to view them.The visuals themselves are real images that are given distortion here and there, and are pieced together to coincide with the song being performed, rather than the cookie-cutter style of playing random visuals to go along with whatever is going on with the music. The visuals even, although obviously for the eye candy factor, are good at provoking thought and images and memories of things you may have encountered in your life, which makes the Underworld experience all the more personal.If you've never heard of Underworld (chances are you've heard a track or two in your time if you're in the dance scene), then this might be worth checking out for you. If you know and appreciate Underworld's music, then you should have NO EXCUSE for not having this DVD! :)"