In November 2011, Devin Townsend (and friends) came to London to treat fans of the Devin Townsend Project’sfouralbumconcept to the whole shebang. That meant four shows across four nights, featuring august djent, seething progressive metal whales, gothic cheerleaders, soft shuffle blues, presidential campaigns, glorious power metal, and pretty much everything in between. And they filmed it. We asked Ruth Booth to check out whether By A Thread is as good to watch back as she remembers it being at the time.
Cradle of Filth Evermore Darkly Peaceville Records 18 October 2011
by Jon Kerr
Famed for their ever-changing band members and labels (and one of the most offensive band t-shirts in history) Cradle of Filth are argubaly Suffolk’s finest extreme metal export. Having maintained an impressive run of recording and touring throughout their nearly twenty-year lifespan, is Evermore Darkly proof that they’re still the gift that keeps on giving…?
It’s a busy night in London. Katatonia headlining the Koko, performing Last Fair Deal Gone Down in its entirety and filming for a new DVD. Marty Friedman is at the Camden Underworld, widdling away and giving the guitar geeks all the musical porn they need to fretwank to. New York bruisers Emmure are headlining the Relentless Garage, providing the perfect downtuned soundtrack for some brutal pit action and dance moves people choose to forget when they wake up. DETAG.
Nirvana Live At Reading Geffen Records 02 November 2009
by Hugh Platt
You know what you don’t see anymore? Kids in Nirvana hoodies. When I was a teenager, they were everywhere – getting their ears pierced in that dodgy shop on the top floor of the mall, skateboarding badly up and down in the park, and hanging around outside off-licenses trying to buy cider. But not anymore.
Anthrax
Oidivnikufesin
Through Time POV
Universal Records
by Joel McIver
Of the Big Four Of Thrash, Anthrax were always the most entertaining. Metallica had the big ambitions, Megadeth the vitriol and Slayer the giddying acceleration, but only this bunch of New Yorkers brought the noise in a way that made you laugh while you moshed. Their antics are back for your viewing pleasure on these two DVDs.
Like most of us, I pretty much ignored Anthrax after 1990’s Persistence Of Time, which didn’t really match up to their classic ’80s canon. Oidivnikufesin (it’s “nice fuckin’ video” backwards) is a classic 1987 show that included the big-shorts thrash anthems (‘I Am The Law’, ‘Among The Living’, ‘Indians’, ‘A.I.R.’) which you’ll remember jumping about to in your bedroom if you’re over 30.
Anybody younger than that might find it all a bit weird, what with guitarist Scott Ian shaving ‘Not’ into his chest fur, the endless gurning, the masses of black hair (head and body) which covered the band and singer Joey Belladonna’s insistence on wearing a Red Indian head-dress.
Watch ‘Among The Living’ from Oidivnikufesin by Anthrax
Still, the fast and furious beats from drummer Charlie Benante and Ian’s ridiculously precise riffage make it immediately clear that Anthrax were a serious metal band under all the clowning.
Through Time POV is less coherent, a bunch of live clips glued together with some interview footage. The live stuff is mostly songs that you’ve already seen on Oidivnikufesin or Youtube, although the version of ‘Gung-Ho’ – a thrash anthem like few others – is still a must-see.
The chats from the band, pictured at their late-80s commercial peak, don’t really add an awful lot of value (although their mile-a-minute, Noo Yoik-style patter is hilarious), which leaves the DVD as a slight souvenir of a long-gone era. Stick with Oidivnikufesin, it’s much better.
Oidivnikufesin5/6 Through Time POV 2/6
Both Through Time POV and Oidivnikufesin by Anthrax are out now on Universal
Bowling For Soup
Live and Very Attractive
A&G Records
by Hugh Platt
Live videos are tough to get right. Get it wrong, and it’s a dullard’s cut’n’shut of live clips and lung-numbingly dull shots of the band lurking inside airport lounges. Get it right though, and you’ve got something as fascinating as Lamb of God’s warts’n’all Walk With Me In Hell.
Now Bowling For Soup have decided to cement their position as the kings of toilet-humour punk with Live and Very Attractive, shot during their last year’s UK jaunt at the Manchester Apollo.
The gig itself is 90 minutes of songs you’ll have absorbed like punk rock radiation. ‘1985’, ‘Punk Rock 101’, and ‘Girl All The Bad Guys Want’. It’s a fine performance – it’s everything else on the DVD that’s the problem.
Live and Very Attractive talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk. The band talks and talks about the antics they get up to on tour, but they don’t actually do… well… anything.
Older, married, and less likely to set fire to each others farts these days, the only thing duller than this, is that time at a gig before the headliner when all you have to is gauge whether you’ve got time to hit the bar or not.
Watch an interview with director of the “fun and crazy film”, King Hollis
The band even manages to make the commentary track even greyer than that of a regular DVD. The most exciting bit is when two of them go to the toilet at the same time.
Towards the end of the DVD, there’s a rare moment of collective post-gig drunkenness. “Usually within 20 minutes,” the bus driver slurs, “Bowling For Soup are in bed,” while BFS bassist Erik Chandler creases up in a silent cackle of tacit agreement.
It’s hard not to find this moment to be all too precise a summing up of the whole Bowling For Soup DVD experience.
3/6
Live And Very Attractive by Bowling For Soup is out now on A&G Records
We are huge Batman fans here at Thrash Hits .com so when Raziq Rauf was invited to a special preview screening of the new Batman film, The Dark Knight, he almost bit their hand off. Here’s our review.
Let’s make this whole review about The Joker. More specifically, let’s make it all about the late Heath Ledger’s portrayal because it is absolutely magnificent.
First things first. Will he get an Oscar? Probably not. As brilliantly malevolent as Ledger is in this performance and as ready the public are to commemorate his life and work with a posthumous Oscar, it’s wholly unlikely that the role of The Joker is dull enough for The Academy to acknowledge with a gong.
Ledger is the stand out star in The Dark Knight. While Christian Bale broods with silent yet excitingly forceful anticipation – in that way that only Bale can and always does do – it’s clear from the off who the star is.
Watch the first trailer for The Dark Knight
The theme is loosely based on the Frank Miller comic book series, The Dark Knight Returns and with Sin City, Daredevil and Robocop his other titles to have been transformed into a movie, you get an idea of the brutality inside and the antihero nature of Batman.
Bale is fascinatingly vicious as Batman. He growls away at Captain Gordon and then smacks up the numerous perps with a vital mix of clinical precision and brute force. Comic fans note: The blows he later lands on The Joker are as close to the beating he serves up in The Killing Joke as you’re likely to see on the big screen.
Just as Batman is refreshingly remorseless in his quest for justice, The Joker is unerringly relentless is his pursuit of chaos. Heath Ledger is just as, if not even more maniacal than anything in the comics.
Maybe he has actually played the role perfectly. Maybe because the character is so ridiculously frightening and unpredictably violent on the page, as Ledger brings The Joker to life in such dazzling fashion, the viewer manages to feel true, pure dread – a very difficult emotion to evoke.
It has been well documented that Ledger always goes the extra mile for his roles and that he represented a psychotic, knife-wielding, ultra-scarred mentalist so convincingly and compellingly, one can only wonder to what lengths the Australian Oscar-nominee went.
Watch the second trailer for The Dark Knight
On top of Bale and Ledger, Christopher Nolan had some of the finest actors around at his disposal here with the pedigree of Gary Oldman, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman taking secondary roles. The impressive cast does everything that is expected of them, with ease.
Aaron Eckhart is excellent as the conscientious, all-American Number One Son of Gotham City as District Attorney Harvey Dent until his slightly ungainly transformation into Two Face while, as the love interest for TDK, Maggie Gyllenhall casts the spectre of Katie Holmes’ insipid performance in Batman Begins far away simply by actually having a personality.
While those actors helped Nolan’s masterpiece achieve, it was he that sculpted the breathtaking cityscape in a way that sets this summer blockbuster masked head and caped shoulders above the rest of the pack.
Rather than any fantastical caricature, Gotham City simply looks like any other grimy, crime-riddled American megalopolis, increasing the sense of realism immeasurably. The stunts are huge and (very) explosive but not ridiculous and overblown.
Stick it all on a big screen – or an absolutely massive screen if you go to the IMAX, and we definitely recommend doing that – and you’ve got an incredibly intense two and a half hours with little no respite.
The early American Psycho-referencing in-joke should certainly be noted with a knowing smirk but it’s just another trivial part of a comic book adaptation that, however brilliantly executed, will struggle to be considered serious or highbrow enough to warrant the most high profile Oscars.
My Chemical Romance
The Black Parade Is Dead!
Reprise Records
by Anne Waites
My Chemical Romance have never been a band to do anything by halves, so when they decided to kill off their alter egos The Black Parade it was always going to be a dramatic and very public execution.
That they decided to bring this section of their lives to an end in front of a giant audience in Mexico, a country that remembers its ancestors and celebrates passing into the next life with its annual Day Of The Dead, is surely no coincidence with a band this obsessed with attention to detail.
Luckily, on a tour blighted with bandmembers dropping like flies, the Mexico City gig finds them in their full number and bursting with fiery intensity. Gerard Way, from the earliest days in the skankiest venues, has always been a born rock star, and as he creeps across the stage like the singer from Tim Burton’s wildest dreams, or flings his arms out, eyes gleaming, soaking in the rapture of the audience, he’s untouchable.
Unlike many live DVDs, this is an event worth documenting, the band tighter than they’ve ever been, deathly pale beneath the fireworks and confetti, demonic during the gloriously hellish ‘Mama’. Talk about going out in style.
Watch the trailer for The Black Parade Is Dead! by My Chemical Romance
But for every end there’s a new beginning, which is why the decision to follow Mexico City with a show at Maxwell’s in New Jersey, a venue roughly the size of a large envelope, is as significant as the arena gig.
Representing their rebirth as My Chemical Romance, going back to their roots, it’s feral, powerful, and they look like there’s nowhere on earth they’d rather be at that moment. After the bells and whistles of The Black Parade, it’s a reminder of the power they wield in the lowliest of circumstances. And it’ll have any fan excited about where their next path will lead.
6/6
The Black Parade Is Dead! by My Chemical Romance is out now on Reprise Records
Cannibal Corpse
Centuries Of Torment: The First 20 Years by Cannibal Corpse
Metal Blade Records
by Bob Mulhouse
There are faster, more brutal death metal bands than Cannibal Corpse, but there are none more consistent or with such an unearthly ability to write catchy songs.
‘Catchy’, of course, doesn’t mean cheerful – it means groove-laden and unforgettable, like the horrific Hammer Smashed Face or I Cum Blood.
This lies at the heart of the CC approach, and thus at the centre of this lavish 3-DVD package, issued to celebrate two decades of slasher-themed extreme metal.
As Cannibal Corpse are Metal Blade’s cash cow, it’s no surprise that the label have splashed out on a ton of content.
Watch the trailer to Centuries Of Torment by Cannibal Corpse
The three-hour main feature takes the viewer back to the mid-80s with the help of former singer Chris Barnes (now all chummy again with his old band), onlookers such as Monstrosity, Ice-T and Trivium and a slew of associated personnel.
The editing is engagingly brisk, lending Centuries… a professional air which is streets ahead of any other metal DVD issued to date. And the bonus footage? Another three hours of live shows. Essential.
5/6
Centuries Of Torment: The First 20 Years by Cannibal Corpse is out on July 8 on Metal Blade
Lamb Of God
Walk With Me In Hell
Roadrunner Records
by Salvadore Fernandez
Lamb Of God have some pedigree when it comes to making live/tour DVDs. 2005′s wittily-titled Killadelphia achieved platinum status in the US and featured some amazing footage including the notorious drunken street fight between singer Randy Blythe and guitarist Mark Morton.
What goes on tour…
Walk With Me In Hell holds two whole discs containing over five hours of their self-styled Pure American Metal and it’s just as much of a treat as their last offering.
While the first disc holds the feature documentary that includes tonnes of in-depth material from their Sacrament world tour, disc two has their complete, uncut performance from Download Festival 2007 plus the uncensored version of the video to ‘Redneck’.
Watch the fight between Randy Blythe and Mark Morton from Killadelphia
Highlights include the band going to the zoo in Australia, which includes some extreme close-ups of various unwitting animals, and a promo day that hilariously showcases the band’s professional (bored) side.
Imagine if the band returned to the exact same bus that the aforementioned brawl began on. It would be interesting, right? It happened. Oh, it happened and it was actually quite sad to see the band’s morale drop so low, so fast but that’s what this DVD is all about.
Watch the trailer for Walk With Me In Hell by Lamb Of God
The beauty of Lamb Of God’s documentation is that they refuse to censor a single thing. They depict themselves in a warts ‘n’ all manner. Obsessive fans might want to know everything. With Walk With Me In Hell on your shelf, they won’t have to stalk the band at least.
If you watch this DVD, you will understand everything about this band. You will come to love every regular nuance and relationship idiosyncrasy within the band and that’s exactly how they want it.
5.5/6
Walk With Me In Hell by Lamb Of God is out now on Roadrunner Records
