LIVE IN KRAKOW - ACOUSTIC

Who are those anonymous blockheads that give full rates to releases that are obviously quite poor? I'll be very short, in fact I wouldn't bother to write about this DVD at all if there weren't those foolish ratings that in my sincere opinion have so badly gone wrong. A week ago I bought both of dubiously re- released Krakow DVD's from library at 1 euro each. [As I realized later with my friends, the DVD of the electric set was faulty: it featured only seven tracks instead of 18 or so that were listed. The visual quality wasn't very good, and the 1995 concert itself nothing special either - and of course the most interesting tracks such as 'Fugazi' weren't on my DVD.]

This acoustic set then was even bigger let-down musically. By the way, also a CD of the same content was included. I listened to it quickly (using skip button several times) and felt that it's totally useless extra. At this point I hadn't checked the DVD's and didn't yet know I wouldn't care to save them either to myself. This set of nine songs (total length was few minutes below an hour) has both some rather boring songs and some well known - even classic - songs: 'Kayleigh', 'Lavender' and 'The Company' would be the top 3 in here. But now we come to the crucial question: how good are the live versions? Frankly, this acoustic gig sounds just tired. As someone else said, as we had changed this DVD into the player, the acoustic approach brings no extra interest to the songs. Fish's voice is far from good shape. Camera work is cheap. There's no way to rate this any higher than two stars, and even that probably has one star too many. Also the layout is terribly cheap looking. Avoid!