R.E.M. - Road Movie

REM - stadium band.

No, I'm sorry, that's just wrong. I think their first album, Murmur, is just wonderful, but they definitely lost something over the years. There's a lot of good songs on this disc, but none have the simple beauty of Perfect Circle or Shaking Through to my jaded ears.

You can't complain about the quantity of tracks though:

I Took Your Name, What's The Frequency, Kenneth?, Crush With Eyeliner, Undertow, The Wake-up Bomb, Revolution, Losing My Religion, Binky The Doormat, Orange Crush, Strange Currencies, Tongue, Man On The Moon, Country Feedback, Find The River, The One I Love, Star 69, Let Me In, Everybody Hurts, It's The End of The World As We Know It.

Okay, so accepting that they can't play small clubs again, let's dive in and shout along like lemmings...

This disc really doesn't look very good, but to be fair, it's much as you'd expect for concert footage. Quality varies wildly from shot to shot, with some looking very grainy, others out-of-focus and yet others being edge-enhanced to a hideous extent. Obviously the disc was mastered for VHS and the image 'enhancing' probably worked well to counteract what James Cameron lovingly (?) referred to as 'crap-vision'.

I noticed no obvious MPEG artifacting, which is something. The image is full-screen, and I think the camera monkeys might have been slightly inebriated.. :)

The audio isn't much cop either. A big 2-channel PCM wall of noise, there's not much in the way of fidelity. The timbre is a little top heavy and wearing. I guess if you turned it right up and put your head against the speaker you might be able to recreate the live experience, but it's a long way short of Sarah McLachlans wonderfully-recorded Mirrorball concert, Elvis Costello's A Case For Song or Ani DiFranco's Living in Clip double album that was mixed from a single unsupervised ADAT!

Such is the way with large arena concerts, unfortunately. The performances are quite respectable though, so fans will be more than satisfied. What am I saying? They already have this on video, surely.

One point to mention - it sounds really good cranked up from the next room!

Well, it's subtitled. Strangely enough, you get both lyric subtitles, and closed captions, which are exactly the same as the lyrics with musical notes at each side of the lyric..

Hmm. Would a deaf person really buy a concert video??

You already know whether you want this disc or not. Don't make me judge art! Sing! Dance! Be happy!