ALIVE

The first live release from Swedish Meshuggah is a mandatory purchase for fans of the band, and may also be good for newbies to start with. Alive consitsts of 105 minutes on DVD and 65 minutes on CD. It is packaged beautifully in a digipak, with a booklet of cool images. The cover is a funny parody on the Alien film poster. Nerds ought to know this already.

The DVD is part road movie, and part live music. The movie is very beatutifully filmed in black and white, and shows a bit behind the scenes, and the band members give interviews and stuff. It was mainly inspired by Led Zep's The Song Remains the Same movie according to the director. The live songs are executed perfectly, but still not just stiff copies of the studio versions. Perpetual Black Second is now much more energic and speeded up, and in Lethargica the clean section is replaced by some cool trippy guitar droning. The solos, that are improvised as always, are great, and you can actually see Fredrik playing them, unlike on the Nothing DVD, which also has a lot worse camerawork than this.

The songs are placed randomly in between the film, but on the CD they all come in the order they were played to keep the continiuty, wich is a big up. The material is from 4 shows (small club in New York, large arena in Tokyo etc). The picture quality is mostly great, but from the Japan show wich was a bit darker the picture is at times a bit grainy. The production otherwise is great, but one very major minus is that the soundtrack is in stereo only, no surround sound. I was greatly excpecting to hear Meshuggah in surround for the first time ever, but no. However this is a tremendous release by one of the leading metal bands right now, you buy it!

Alien movie poster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alien_movie_poster.jpg