Live Untold

For the average buyer, Laaz Rockit's material is next to impossible to find for a fair price and that's if you can even find their releases. So it seemed almost too good to be true to see that they released a DVD just a year ago, which can be purchased directly off their main site. Hoping I'd get some kind of legendary release that could hold me over from all of their other stuff, I ended up finding myself being a little disappointed with this utterly sloppy DVD.

One of the biggest complaints here is the track listing. While they have certainly nailed it with some classics like Fire in the Hole, Shot to Hell, Last Breath, Euroshima, etc you're going to see some of these songs more than once here. The prelude itself is played three times. So instead of 27 tracks which could have covered the majority of their albums, you see some of the same songs played over again and again.

Then we get to a monstrous complaint, which could be summed up as the technical freak's ultimate nightmare. What options do we have with this DVD? Why, we have "Play Video" and "Scene Select" and ... that's it! I really wish that was a joke, but its not. There are absolutely no sound options, no special features, no bonus things here and there, there's nothing. You play the movie or select scenes and that's it. On top of this some of the special effects are embarrassing to see, Photoshop could have done better.

The majority of the documentary segments are definitely interesting to see, but its just too sloppy to easily get into. It seems like they just took a stack of notes from Laaz Rockit's career and threw them all randomly into a paper shredder to create the DVD. A lot of the documentary scenes popup throughout songs, dividing both the song and the history into odd little pieces. However this only lasts for the first third of the DVD. After that the show really begins with the footage from "Thrash Domination, Kawasaki Japan 2005". From then on its more consistent and songs play uninterrupted. The quality is pretty good and sounds great as well, most of the time. Occasionally they throw in some old bootlegged videos from their earlier days. They're definitely up to par with their youngerselves and vocalist Michael Coons still sounds pretty damn awesome. They might not be jumping around and falling over like they used to back in the day, but the performances here are very pleasing to watch. You can tell they're having a blast and giving it their all.

Overall its pretty enjoyable and definitely worth buying for the fans, just don't go in expecting a lot of quality behind this. There's no options, hardly any 'real' documentary scenes that actually give you some insightful history behind the band (a lot of them are just scenes of the band members joking around about random stuff, like Metallica. Oh and donuts), terrible special effects, and very randomly put together. But its all fun in the end. Willy Lange is one crazy bitch! Cool, but it probably could have been a lot more. Kind of a shame too since this could very well be the last thing the band ever releases.