What
a killer couple of DVDs The Final Act is. Are! Chock full of
cool tunes including a gob of rare b-sides, all well performed, well
shot, well edited... if you're a new Luna Sea fan, you'll be a much
bigger one after watching; and if you're already a big Luna Sea fan,
you've seen the DVD and know I'm right!
There's
a couple of Luna Sea's trademark long and boring tunes (Genesis
of Mind, anyone?!), but for the most part, it's kickin' stuff...
by far the best part are when songs you don't quite know (like A
Vision, which i think is off Lunacy, but I'm not quite positive)
kick in, and you get to rediscover them all over again!
The
X Japan live On the Verge of Destruction DVDs, on the other
hand, pale in comparison.
On
my first night alone in Japan (more or less) I turned on the tele
and bam, there was Yoshiki, circa-1999 (with the shorter hairdo and
the neck brace he always wore) drumming away on stage somewhere, and
then they showed Hide, and Toshi and Pata and Heath, and I sat up
and went "Whoa! Who's this?!" Not long afterward, I saw
their double-video (for On the Verge of Destruction) on sale
-- used, natch -- and picked it up, and four years later I was playing
Endless Rain live on stage in New York. :)
So
rewatching the video that got me started in the genre is kinda depressing
-- for one thing, the transfer seems weak (it only looks as good as
my VHS copy, which i haven't watched for at least six months now),
and damn there's a lot of filler on the discs: Hide's 20 minute guitar
solo (if you can even call it that; it's mostly him laughing into
a mic with large amounts of echo smarming it up) just completely reeks,
and Yoshiki's solo isn't much better. Then Orgasm has a 20
minute interlude for crowd screaming, and X has an extra 20
minutes, and Kurenai clocks in at a few minutes longer too
boot. Then Endless Rain goes on forever at the end (although
it's pretty cool, with the crowd singing the chorus over and over
and OVER)...
So
really, all you get that's repeatably listenable is Silent Jealousy,
Sadistic Desire, Desperate Angel, Week End, and Joker, and
maybe we can count Kurenai and Endless Rain as well.
That's seven of the NINETEEN tracks listed. The other actual songs
I haven't mentioned, like Celebration and Standing Sex, suck; and
Voiceless Screaming is okay, I guess, once every decade. And that's
it. Boo!!!
Once
cool side note: the CDs of On the Verge come in a big, weird
double-CD case that will never fit on any CD-size shelf or rack. The
DVDs come in the same case.
Totally
unrelatedly, Kayo's watching some typical Japanese TV show which apparently
requires cheating husbands to bring their wives and their mistresses
together in the same room and argue. They're only showing the audio
(the video is just a blurred image and a text transcription), but
apparently the husband and the mistress have had a child together,
which the wife is angry about, and the husband's defense was "Don't
worry, trust me!" Ah ha, the show is called Husband vs Wife
vs Lover!
Back
to my CD reviews!
The
Missalina Rei thing is okay; a little light and brittle for my tastes,
but heavyish. The Pierrot album (Pandora's Box) was not so
hot; far from the quality of Celluloid and Screen (which
are the two discs Pandora's Box is ranked with in the band's
official discography -- under Indies). So that's a little disappointing
too, but I was pretty confident before I bought the CD that none of
the songs on it had ever appeared on any of Pierrot's live DVDs. That's
usually a good sign that the band doesn't think much of the album
either, if they never play 'em after they've gotten famous.
So
risk taken, loss incurred... but i still got Missa!!! Which
only has one really really good song on it, Garden. And a couple
okay songs, and a couple crap songs that I put up with because it's
easier to do that than to stop typing my diary and hit the "next
track" button.
Ooh,
one other bit of note: I saw the new video for the new L'Arc~en~Ciel
song, which I wanna say "Tribute Spirits" but that's not
right! Spirit Dreams Inside Another Dream, maybe? Something
like that... but anyway, the song appears in the Final Fantasy
movie, over the end credits (which I guess is the coolest/most-honored
place for a song to be) and so the video features lots of Final
Fantasy movie clips, but the cool part is that it's got four FF
soldiers playing the song on stage, moving just like L'Arc.
I
guess they put some sort o' body sensors on Ken, Tetsu, Hyde and Yukihiro,
filmed them performing, dropped that into a computer, and the computers
spit out the four CG soldiers playing Ken's ugly red guitar and Tetsu's
ugly woodgrain Fender bass. It's an okay video, but the song ain't
so hot, and hence the video suffers as well. Neat idea though. But
someone at the record company probably should have said, "Hmm,
since Hyde's cute face sells half the records L'Arc has put out, shouldn't
we kinda put his face in the video somewhere?" Because now, it's
just some unidentifiable band playing a song; it could just as easy
be Metallica as L'Arc. Or Lynnrd Skynnrd! Freeeeebiiiiird!
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