E-Mail This Article to a Friend Seeing is believing This year’s holiday windfall is on DVD

The big news in audio in 2003 was . . . video. Sure, there have been discussions that would have the remaining major labels all agreeing on some form of encoding that would make MP-3 and other forms of digital downloads difficult if not impossible. But more and more, artists, their managers, and the labels themselves are realizing that something is needed in the interim to hold on to the consumer base they’ve been drawing on for the past 50 or 60 years. And the answer has turned out to be video, as in enhanced CDs with Web links to special sites and "bonus" DVDs filled with concert footage, music videos, and behind-the scenes footage, not to mention easy-to-compile collections of MTV videos for bands who’ve been around long enough to have a dozen or so already in the can.

The proof is in the holiday-season pudding. Usually Christmas brings an avalanche of high-profile, high-priced box sets. There are a few minor ones coming out this season, but the real flood of product has been in the DVD market, where everyone, from has-beens like Pat Benatar to the biggest rock-and-roll band in the world (i.e., the Rolling Stones), seems to have a new DVD on the market. Some, like the Stones set and a deluxe Once in a Lifetime Talking Heads four-CD set, amount to the video versions of audio box sets. Others, like Pearl Jam: Live at the Garden and Coldplay Live 2003, are self-explanatory. The cheap way out is to throw together a bunch of videos with some amusing behind-the-scenes footage, which is what smaller labels like the Bay Area indie Lookout! have done; Turn-On Tune-In Lookout brings together videos by the Donnas, Pansy Division, Bratmobile, and others. The big issue is whether to package these DVDs in regular DVD containers or to make them look like regular CDs. Most labels have chosen the former approach; U2’s first live DVD, U2 Go Home: Live from Slane Castle, Ireland, is the most conspicuous exception. The problem is that most music fans head straight for the CD section; if a band’s DVD is in the video aisles, those shoppers may never see it, but if it’s in the music area, shoppers who expect to find music DVDs in the video section may miss out. Before long, we’ll probably see two versions of each music DVD, one in a DVD box and one in a CD jewel box, just to ensure that everyone gets maximum exposure.

In the meantime, even regular CD releases by big artists. from LeAnn Rimes to Linkin Park, are being packaged with special "bonus" DVDs. It’s a desperate, tentative solution: before long, computer geeks are going find a way to make video files compact enough for Internet trading and the game will be up. For now, though, this holiday season has brought a bounty of video releases that appear to have taken the place of the old box set. Here’s a sampling; look for reviews of the Stones’ Four Flicks and Coldplay 2003 next week in my "Pop Rocks" column. And let’s hope that by this time next year the music business will have found some reasonable solution to the digital downloading problem so that we can move on to more interesting controversies, like . . . , oh, Michael Jackson.

– Matt Ashare, Music Editor

Blue Man Group, THE COMPLEX ROCK TOUR LIVE (Lava). The Blue Man Group’s first full-blown summer rock tour wasn’t quite the epochal event the franchise’s spinmasters claimed, but it was still a lot of fun — and a chance to see a slew of notable Boston rockers including Tracey Bonham, singer/keyboardist Peter Moore, and guitarist Dave Steel perform in an unusual context. This DVD, which captures a concert from that tour, is best when it puts you on stage with the spotlight-stealing Blue Men, whose aliens-on-acid shtick plays right into the excessive volume and spectacle of big-league rock. Numbers like "Sing Along" and "Your Attention Please" give the blue-ink-stained critters a chance to take deadpan delight in leading the audience through concert rituals. And the music often rocks with fierce, feedback-soaked abandon.

Some of the best numbers, like "Drumbone," blend the Blue guys’ patented portrayals of quirky, quizzical discovery with their penchant for beating on things — mostly plastic-like tubes of various shapes and sizes — to produce tones that split the difference between beat and melody. But there are full-blown rockers, too, like "The Current," which is also featured as a bonus video with Bush’s Gavin Rossdale singing lead. (The MTV-friendly Dave Matthews–led version of "Sing Along" is also here.) On the down side, there are too many distance shots of the action on the stage, and they compromise the intimacy and the up-close thrills that concert films are all about. And Bonham’s vocal performance saps the life from a cover of the Who’s "Baba O’Riley." But who would sound good against the template of Roger Daltrey’s original rocket-launcher delivery of those lyrics?

— Ted Drozdowski

The Chemical Brothers, Singles ’93-’03 (Astralwerks). Melding bedrock-firm beats to far-from-concrete imagery, the British-based psychedelic big-beat DJ/production duo of Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands injected humanized grit and giddiness into mechanized groove. Better known as the Chemical Brothers, Simons and Rowlands interspersed bleary miasma with moments of clarity, a motion-streaked clatter as instantly intoxicating as opiates crossing the blood-brain barrier. Since 1995, their work and its visual representation have personified the thin membrane separating the rational from the ritualistic.

A Region 0 disc playable on all continents, Singles ’93-’03 comprises nine videos and six live performances covering all but three tracks on the corresponding, separately available CD ("Song to the Siren," "Leave Home," and "Get Yourself High" are exclusive to the audio disc). In exchange, the DVD features clips for "Life Is Sweet," "Elektrobank," and "Hoops" and a live-in-concert segue of New Order’s "Temptation" into the Chemical Brothers’ "Star Guitar," four numbers not on the CD. Materials are split into "Promos" and "Live"; those who wish to chart the duo’s progression can select "Chronology."

Simons and Rowlands make subtle, Hitchcock-like cameos that you can enjoy trainspotting. As for the live footage, it’s a kinetic multi-camera mesh of stroboscopic, supersaturated sweeps and hallucinogenic overlays. The audio is firmly mastered and with the appropriate processing is discretely mapped to rear channels in a manner that provides more width than movement, never challenging center stage but exhibiting satisfying girth. An "Interviews" section offers short sound bites from such collaborators and contemporaries as Beth Orton, Norman "Fatboy Slim" Cook, and the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne, plus Oasis’s Noel Gallagher, Charlatans UK’s Tim Burgess, New Order’s Bernard Sumner, and former Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft — or "Britain’s Great Rock Voices," as Rolling Stone’s David Fricke refers to them in the liner notes. A behind-the-scenes "Private Reels" section rounds out the DVD’s perspectives.

— Tony Ware

Devo, THE COMPLETE TRUTH ABOUT DE-EVOLUTION (Rhino). If MTV had never existed, Devo would have had to invent it. Before they were a working band, the Kent State art department’s gift to new wave were a high-concept visual entity, equal parts aggressive nerdiness, dehumanized sexuality, and Midwestern kitsch. Starting with 1976’s two-song short "In the Beginning Was the End," this release collects all but one of their videos (their morphed "Are U Experienced?" is missing, thanks to a flat refusal from the Hendrix estate), from the image-defining "Satisfaction" to more elaborate productions from the hit Freedom of Choice/New Traditionalists period. (And, it must be said, some weak work from their late-career decline.) Tube watchers of a certain age already have the S&M-dude-ranch setting of "Whip It" branded on their libidos, but less-aired clips like "Love Without Anger" (chicken masks, decapitated Barbie dolls) and "That’s Good" (animated French fry penetrates animated doughnut and breaks in half) are just as witty and disturbing.

Mark Mothersbaugh’s alter ego Booji Boy rears his latex baby head repeatedly, controlling the parade of found film in "Beautiful World" and loading a truck with leaky toxic-waste barrels in "Worried Man" (from Neil Young’s vanity feature Human Highway). Beyond articulate commentary by Mothersbaugh and bassist/"Chief Strategist" Gerald Casale, the disc’s extras include a short interview with Chuck Statler (Casale’s frequent co-director), goofy testimonials for Pioneer’s first consumer laserdisc players, and vintage between-video "bridges" featuring Laraine Newman and Dr. Timothy Leary. Rarest of all: shaky footage of a pre-Devo performance in 1973 in which a monkey-masked Mothersbaugh derails the band’s blues-rock rudiments. History-minded fans should also track down Jade Dellinger & David Giffel’s definitive new biography Are We Not Men? We Are Devo! (SAF Publishing). But the DVD itself may be just the gift for that precocious 14-year-old who’s begun to suspect that human progress might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

— Franklin Bruno

Duran Duran, GREATEST: THE DVD (EMI). Location, location, location: it really was the secret to Duran Duran’s success. It didn’t hurt that they were handsome, but what cemented these photogenic Brits in the public consciousness, and made them one of the earliest acts to parlay MTV rotation into mainstream popularity, was a trio of promotional videos for their 1982 smash Rio, shot against stunning South American and Asian scenery and featuring a bevy of scantily clad models smeared with neon body paints.

You’ll find all three — "Hungry like the Wolf," "Rio," and "Save a Prayer" — on the first half of this two-DVD set, which features videos for 21 of the quintet’s hits. Surveying the first four years of the band’s career, disc one is the keeper. After apparently exhausting their travel budget, the boys veered into Mad Max territory (if Mel Gibson had been fussier about his bronzer) for "Union of the Snake" and "Wild Boys." This jaw-dropping pair of clips forges the missing link between Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats and Fischerspooner, teeming with jungle-gym choreography, hairstyles teased to the heavens, and fur-trimmed leotards.

The second disc, documenting the lean period following 1985’s #1 "A View to a Kill" theme for the James Bond movie, is spottier. As the group began to conform to the standards of the medium they’d helped pioneer, their on-screen charm waned; "Notorious" looks suspiciously like a collage of leftover bits from Robert Palmer’s "Addicted to Love" and Steve Winwood’s "Higher Love." The boys did develop a sense of humor with the passage of time — elfin keyboard player Nick Rhodes is all smiles during the dreary ballad "Serious" — but the early offerings, where they take themselves seriously in some truly absurd scenarios, are still far more entertaining. Extras include alternate versions of seven videos, interviews, and watching directors find new ways to camouflage Simon Le Bon’s multiple chins.

— Kurt B. Reighley

Foo Fighters, EVERYWHERE BUT HOME (RCA). As frontman of the successful but curiously underhyped guitar-rock outfit Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl has married pungent, melodic songwriting to an arena-ready sense of bombast; when the singer and former Nirvana drummer titled the band’s 1997 album The Colour and the Shape, he might have been searching for a way to describe the qualities he wanted his music to have. The centerpiece of Everywhere But Home, a new DVD documenting the Foos’ world tour in support of last year’s One by One, is a 15-song set recorded in Toronto. There’s plenty of hard-rock muscle for those Foo fans enraptured by riffs, including a rendition of Colour’s "My Hero" that devolves into a 6/8 metalhead swing and a cranky "Have It All" that retains the residue of Grohl’s short-lived stint in Josh Homme’s SoCal stoner-rock unit Queens of the Stone Age. But there’s also the sweet alterna-rock optimism of "Learn To Fly" and "Times like These" (the latter with Grohl on acoustic guitar), both of which suggest what Grohl’s old bandmate Kurt Cobain might have become if he’d overcome his depression and found happiness as an LA studio pro. Two songs filmed at an enormous outdoor concert at Slane Castle (one of them "Everlong," Grohl’s best tune) revisit the heady days captured in Dave Markey’s 1991: The Year Punk Broke, back when Cobain got a kick out of having mud flung at him by crusty European festivalgoers. Still, some backstage shenanigans from Grohl and sidekick/drummer Taylor Hawkins would’ve provided this all-business DVD with a crucial third dimension.

— Mikael Wood

The Hellacopters, GOODNIGHT CLEVELAND (Music Video Distributors). Sweden’s Hellacopters are nothing if not children of the ’70s — after escaping the death-boogie metal outfit Entombed, drummer-turned-frontman Nicke Andersson threw his record collection (Kiss, Stooges, MC5, Sonic’s Rendezvous, Radio Birdman, Motown) into a trash bin and set it on fire. Or at least that’s what their first few records sounded like, until original guitarist Dregen split and the band began alternating fast, loud, and lean hard-rock albums with more prosaic, noodlier affairs. This documentary, which was filmed for Swedish television and "shot using the same direct-cinema techniques developed by the master filmmakers of the early ’70s," catches the group during an upsurge, on the last leg of an American tour behind 2002’s raucous High Visibility (Gearhead). They weren’t enjoying any, having squandered their shot at US stardom with the lackluster Grande Rock (on Sub Pop several years earlier), but the live performances here confirm their godhead — from psychedelic feedback orgies in New York to a frantic duet with Sonic’s Scott Morgan in Detroit to a wailing three-guitar onslaught with a guest spot from Gaza Stripper Rick Sims at a show at Boston’s Axis. The film is also pretty good at explaining why the ’Copters never caught on: thanks in part to federal subsidies at home, Swedish rockers are lazy, petulant bastards who seem allergic to even the slightest hint of work. (Bonus points for the English subtitles, which catch ace guitarist Robert "Strings" Eriksson whining in Swedish about a photo shoot with Revolver.) The extras include some extremely rough bootleg footage of the band’s early days — a reminder that any outfit’s second gig ever is probably not a keeper — as well as an obstructed-view document of the Hives’ Howlin’ Pelle joining in for an electrifying take on the Stooges’ "Search and Destroy."

— Carly Carioli