BLU-RAY REVIEWS – Musico-cultural Illiteracy
68 Australian Hi-Fi http://www.avhub.com.au
Shania: Still the One
Live from Vegas
2012Alice Cooper
Live in Montreux
2005Director: Raj Kapoor
Starring: Shania Twain plus three vocalists,
ten instrumentalists, and six dancersDirector: Thierry Amsallem
Starring: Alice Cooper, Ryan Roxie,
Damon Johnson, Chuck Garric,
Eric Singer, Calico CooperT
here are certain cultural languages I just don’t speak. I’m the
type of guy who should like Japanese Anime but it mostly leaves
me cold. I never learnt the ‘language’—the cultural cues which
make it ping the right emotional receptors in me to generate genuine
pleasure. The same goes for country music. But rather than failing to
‘ping the right receptors’, much of it grinds against the wrong ones,
those that make me irritated. And the more ‘country’, the stronger my
reaction.
Which leaves me teetering on a dangerous edge when it comes to a
lot of the top artists of the past fifty years. Linda Ronstadt, The Eagles,
Whitney Houston, all musicians who’ve produced songs I love came
from country roots.
Canadian artist Shania Twain started country and stayed close to it
even as she spun herself an enormously successful pop career. She has
sold some 85 million records, more than twenty million of them the
1997 album ‘Come On Over.’ In 2012 and 2013 she had a stage show at
the Colosseum at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. My goodness, what a show
it was. Her along with nineteen performers. Entrances on a suspended
Harley-Davidson ElectraGlide and on a horse. Costume changes every
few songs. A golden microphone. A massive screen behind the stage
with well-designed and highly dynamic graphics, along with the
occasional film clip starring, of course, Shania herself. But also with a
kind of homely feel. The star leaves the stage and wanders through
the crowd accepting hugs, posing for photos, and even sharing her
microphone with a fan mid-song.
The band is clearly extremely well rehearsed, with very tight playing
that works with the choreography. Symmetry is provided by two male
backup singers who are at least brothers, and even possibly twins.
The music is mostly country rock with a leaning (thankfully) towards
the rock, and I managed to enjoy it despite the slide guitar breaking
through into the mix rather too often. There’s even a nice guitar section
in the lead-in toThat Don’t Impress Me Muchthat verges on hardish rock.
The picture quality was almost entirely first class, marred only by a
couple of brief, slightly out-of-focus sections. It’s shot at a movie-like
24-frames per second so there are no deinterlacing problems irrespective
of the quality of your equipment. The sound captured the live nature of
the performance, while retaining most of the clarity and precision of a
studio recording. Nicely done. The surround mix was a bit strange, with
nearly everything at the front, but sometimes a rather clunky shift of
crowd noise between songs at the back. You can avoid all that with the
stereo LPCM mix if you prefer.
FEATURES
Running time: 94 minutes
Picture: 1.78:1, 1080p24, MPEG2 AVC @ 26.82Mbps
Sound: English: DTS 16/48 3/2.1 @ 1509kbps; English: Dolby Digital 3/2.1
@ 640kbps; English: LPCM 16/48 2/0.0 @ 1536kbps
Subtitles:Nil
Extras: 6 page insert
Restrictions: Exempt, Region FreeMovie: A | Picture: A | Sound: B+ | Extras: DFEATURES
Running time: 92 minutes
Picture: 1.78:1, 1080i60, MPEG4 AVC @ 30.00Mbps
Sound: English: DTS-HD Mater Audio 16/48 3/2.1 @ 2845kbps (core: DTS
16/48 3/2.1 @ 1509kbps); English: LPCM 16/48 2/0.0 @ 1536kbps
Subtitles: English, German, Spanish, French (Documentary only)
Features: 8 page booklet; Documentary (1080i60 - 61 mins)
Restrictions: Exempt, Region FreeMovie: B+ | Picture: A | Sound: A | Extras: BR
ather than developing the cultural sensibilities needed for an
appreciation of country music, I spent my early teens developing
an appreciation of Alice Cooper. And others as well, but it was
centred on Alice Cooper, the group. The album ‘Killer’ with brilliantly
constructed songs such as Dead Babies, the title track, and of course
Halo of Flies, a progressive rock epic that stands with the best of them.
The group did that because... well, because it could.
As someone ‘way more interested in the music than the lyrics, I
didn’t even realise for years that Alice Cooper songs were supposed to
be shocking, and certainly had no idea about the on-stage controversies.
Musically, the group was enormously better than its general reputation,
improving in performance standards through School’s Out, Billion Dollar
Babies and even Muscle of Love.
And then Alice Cooper became Alice Cooper the man, not the group,
and he achieved even greater success with ‘Welcome to My Nightmare.’
Things have come a long way in the rarefied atmosphere of the
Montreux Jazz Festival since Stevie Ray Vaughan was booed in 1982
for performing blues instead of jazz. This concert is Alice Cooper at the
Festival in 2005, and the crowd loved him.
Some of the songs were shortened and run together with others.
That’s what happens when you squeeze 27 songs into a ninety minute
show. Most are from the period up to and including ‘Nightmare’, put
together into a loosely flowing structure. For example, The Ballad of
Dwight Fry from ‘Love it to Death’ is the climax to a medley of numbers
from ‘Welcome to My Nightmare’, which of course came five albums
later.
Cooper is older and stouter, but sings much better as a sober man
than he did live back in the 1970s. His wife-to-be performed on stage
back in the day. This performance has his daughter filling the role.
(Warning: stylised violence against women. Also stylised violence against
Cooper with his James Randi-designed decapitation.)
You have a choice of 16-bit, 48kHz LPCM in stereo, or 5.1 surround
in Dolby Digital or DTS. I’d recommend the DTS. No, of course it isn’t
lossless, but there are tradeoffs to be made. The surround mix has for
once been employed to actually add to the performance, with elements
of the music thrown to the back of the room, the crowd kept properly
off the stage and the creepier musical effects spread all around the room.
The organ fanfare from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Phantom of the Opera’,
which opens the show, is spread out overhead (I had the current version
of Dolby Surround processing running, so it pulled out material and sent
it to the ceiling speakers). Stephen Dawson