Enslaved - Live Retaliation

Rating:
Summary: A Great Release !!!!
Review: Enslaved is one of my favorite bands, the video quality and the sound is amazing...a great release from the Viking Metal Masters !!!!

Larga Vida Al Metal !!!!!

Rating:
Summary: Magnificent!!!
Review: Great live performance, great sound and image quality and all the facts that distinguishes metal from other music genres. I give it 4 stars because I find that strobe light effects annoying and they produce a funny effect on my TV (hope it's not a general problem). Hail Vikings!!!

Rating:
Summary: Almost perfect
Review: Wow. I thought the production values for Emperor's "Emperial Live Ceremony" DVD were impressive, until I got blown away by Enslaved's "Live Retaliation" disc, based on a recent performance of theirs in Krakow, Poland. Featuring a Kronheim-free lineup (with Arve Isdal filling in on lead guitar), and one "Oyvind" handling session keyboardist duties, good ol' Grutle, Ivar (who for some reason is saddled with the incorrect surname "Peerson" on the external packaging even though they got "Bjornson" right on the disc intro itself), and Dirge pound out an amazing set of twelve pieces. Audio and video are both crystal-clear, and even the physical venue is impressive, with a massive stage, epilepsy-inducing lights and a battery of motion-controlled cameras swooping to and fro over the crowd. The music itself was an interesting mixture of old and new, with 2 tracks from "Monumension," 3 from "Frost" as well as the soon-to-be-released "Below the Lights," and 1 each from "Mardraum," "Hordane's Land" and "Viklingr Veldi." They also do a cover of Autopsy's "Retribution for the Dead," which is by far the least impressive cut. Notably absent from this lineup is any representation at all from the rip-roaring "Blodhemn" or the transcendent "Eld," the omissions of which constitute one of the DVD's only glaring shortfalls. Before I get into the rest of the shortfalls, allow me to complete extolling the disc's virtues by mentioning that its editing, although occasionally jarring and hyperactive even by MTV standards, is mostly coherent and even fair, giving all the musicians equal airtime; not only do we get to see Mr. Rep beat the jim-jammity krispy kreme christ out of the drum kit, but closeups of the rest of the band allow us to make out fretworking and discern actual chords. The disc comes with an impressive array of extras, including an interview (a Polish music journalist interviewing Norwegian bandmates, all in English -- gotta love that global village) that is, hilariously, even more disorientingly edited than the concert footage, with incongruous jump-cuts and extreme closeups. There are also six bonus audio tracks, including some alternate takes of "Frost" tunes and an apparent also-ran from "Maurdraum."

The disc does have a few annoyances, some of them nigh dismaying. The performances hit a few sour notes; not only does Oyvind's anemic synthesizer sound lamer than my first Casio keyboard, but Grutle fat-fingers some key bass riffs in (the otherwise excellent) "As Fire Swept Clean the Earth." Surprisingly, Grutle's clean vocals are consistently weak throughout, most notably on "The Voices" and "Queen of Night." On another front, the aforementioned bonus audio tracks are, while a treat in their own right, frustratingly inaccessible. There appears to be no way to access them except by "viewing" them through the DVD menu -- you can't access them as CD audio tracks, or any audio file format readable by a PC CD-ROM drive.

These are minor scuffs on an otherwise towering, shining achievement on the part of Metal Mind Productions. Not only has this disc impressed the pants off me, but it's left me drooling for the release of "Below the Lights." Quit messing around with this review and order this DVD now!!