[Video DVD is enhanced for 16:9 widescreen with DD 5.1 audio and generally duplicates CD except for adding nonmusical stage/audience business]
The Blue Man Group has given up on the DVD-As of their early releases and the DVD-only of their Complex Rock Tour Live of 2003, and released this time a very complete video plus a CD of many of the same selections, also recorded in front of live audiences. The three-man performance group is backed by a big ensemble consisting primarily of electric guitars and drum sets, plus a very high wattage lighting system with strobes, projected images and the whole works. They spend some of the time playing on their clever PVC pipe musical instruments, pounding on their many percussion instruments, and swiping the air with their giant amplified whips.
However, half of their time is spent in a completely nonmusical fashion with various onstage happenings and interactions with the huge audience in the arena. The whole thing lays on the irony with an iron hand. The shtick is supposed to be a TV commercial the BMG sees for a kit training you to be a rock megastar. So they order it (ostensibly using an audience member’s credit card), it arrives instantly, and most of the rest of the concert consists of projected lessons and suggestions from the instructional video, which the BMG act as though they are trying to follow. A long-running offstage voice gives instructions as to different Rock Star Movements, which the BMG then try to teach to the audience – which dutifully follows along.
There are a number of vocal numbers, performed by a male and female pair of vocalists along with some projected images. The songs and images are taken from the Complex DVD-A which we reviewed. This is a sort of semi-live performance of the same songs, but I greatly preferred the originals on the DVD-A. The really imaginative playing around with the instruments found on the earlier BMG presentations is mostly missing here in favor of all sorts of inane fooling around with the audience – mostly getting them to mimic whatever things the disembodied voice said to do and the BMG are doing. There is also much repetition of the same percussion moves and sounds, and a buildup of volume level and lighting effects that soon wears on the mature viewer. (The surround effects are first rate.) All the numbers begin to look and sound alike. The juvenile humor and general eccentricity has begun to pall, as far I’m concerned. But the BMG is considered awesome by the youth, so who am I to knock it?
There are 19 tracks on the CD and 22 plus 3 bonus video features on the DVD.
– John Henry
