Customer Rating:  
Summary: Great show! But 5.1???
Comment: Okay... First off. Me being a huge Radiohead fan and seeing this at Best Buy, I was curious. I did a double-take and kinda hid it in the Queen section of dvd's and headed out to research it before buying it. I wanted to make sure it was worth the $15 or what. I will agree with the prior review. The sound if MOST ASSUREDLY NOT 5.1! It appears to be a direct rip from a German TV network. That's why I only gave it a 4 star rating. Now that that's out of the way... The show itself is NUTS! I loved it!!! This was a historical documentation of Radiohead at total world dominance! The stuff that got ME hooked. I gave this set the ultimate litmus test last night with my girlfriend and she concurred about the awesomeness of the set, etc.,, Totally worth it. Get it before the band has it yanked, since it's not officially licensed. It's just a great historical document and it brought us back to seeing them in Tampa in May this year. Just a great band that is hopefully not yet at their peak.
Buy this, but with guarded expectations.
Great stuff!!!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: So-So DVD: near bootleg picture quality from TV Broadcast, but decent sound
Comment: First, let me qualify this review by saying I am NOT a hardcore Radiohead fan, at least not a fan of their more recent albums, which I have found to be somewhat overrated due to lack of conventional songs, and I'm not a big fan of atonal music/beeps and farts noise. I do have all their albums, more out of curiosity that I am `missing' something groundbreaking that everyone else except me seems to be hearing. However, I do think that The Bends and OK Computer are two exceptional albums, easily among the finest albums of the 90's. They are unquestionably an interesting band, and like them or not, anyone would have to admit they make challenging music, which is more than you can say for 97% of bands today. So there.
That said, I got this DVD because I was (again) mildly curious to see what their live shows have been like, since the only time I ever saw them live was in '97 or so, on the OK Computer tour. Plus, there is not a lot of Radiohead DVD concert material out legitimately, and no serious collection should be without something of theirs. This show is from June of 2001 in Germany, and seems to have a cross-section amount of material from the albums they'd recorded up to that point, except Pablo Honey (and no, "Creep" is not on here). Maybe a bit heavier on the experimental stuff, given that they were touring Amnesiac at the time.
The performance itself is actually pretty good, as good as I recall them back in '97. If you like them, and the more experimental stuff (Kid A and Amnesiac, plus OK Computer), you'll probably enjoy this DVD. The sound quality is actually pretty good (it says it's in 5.1 - I watched it with the sound field on my home theater set to `rock concert' which redistributes the center channel, but I thought the sound overall was ok if not standard-setting. I doubt it's true 5.1). The BIG COMPLAINT here, though, and the cause of me docking it a couple of stars, is the picture. This was clearly taken from German/European TV - it says "BWF" in the upper right corner, and the Rockpalast label w/ some song titles appears periodically in the lower portion of the screen. This was professionally shot, with close ups, wide-outs, decent editing. I don't know what the source of the video was, but I watched it on a 100 inch projection screen, and not only is this thing incredibly grainy when blown up (i suspect it'll look just as grainy at 32-40 inches too), but it has moments where the picture is just absolute garbage - unintended solarization effects, the picture gets `flattened out' / `stretched', some artifacts onscreen from the source, etc. Frankly, I cannot imagine that Radiohead nor EMI would ever have approved this as-is (it was released on a label I've never heard of) nor could they be happy seeing this on the market, because I have to think there are much better concerts sitting in a vault somewhere that they control. IMPORTANT!: The packaging is somewhat misleading too, as there's a photo on the back that's "Pablo"-era, and I think the tracklisting is all screwed up - when I thought the show was over, according to the listing, there was still 20 minutes left on the disc, then they started into "Airbag", then "Just", "The Bends", "How to Disappear Completely" - NONE of which are on the packaging listing. (Guess these were the encores?)
BOTTOM LINE: Given the shortage of non-bootleg Radiohead concert videos on the market (if I recall correctly, the EMI/Capitol-released 1995 Astoria DVD was ok, but not great, at least picture-wise), I guess you'd probably want this if you're a hard-core Radiohead fan. The decent sound quality is about the sole element that is keeping this product from being really no better than a bootleg. But the band should take product like this as a cue to get on the case and put out their own DVD, now that they seem to control their own destiny (or, if there's a stricture against it in their EMI contract covering old concerts from their tenure there, at least talk to EMI about getting a concert DVD of great quality out of the vaults that they can mutually agree on). Here's my math: +3 stars for the performance, +2 stars for the setlist being pretty good (including the songs NOT on the packaging listing), and -2 stars for the horrible video quality.
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