Wake Up and Smell the... Carcass

I'm a big Carcass fan, I've enjoyed every single one of their albums to one degree or another, but this DVD just isn't that exciting.

I'll start by saying the good things. This DVD has all their music videos on it, and yes the two live shows are pretty cool, mostly focusing on their catalogue from Necroticism and Symphonies of Sickness (great!).

The videos, if you haven't seen them before, might be pretty cool at first, but I've seen them all, and they're not that amazing. The "Heartwork" video is first, which is a great song, but the video mostly consists of images of Jeff Walker singing and some weird factory workers creating/destroying, to make some kind of crucifix apparatus, the one from the album cover.

The video for No Love Lost is similarly uninteresting, except substituting the factory shots for blood dripping on a white rose. The video for Keep on Rotting in the Free World is pretty uninteresting too.. the images are taken from a concert they did, and it manages to lose my attention by the end of the song. The video for Corporal Jigsore Quandary is decent, it's another concert video... but it's from the same Gods of Grind concert that we see later in the video.. so we have to sit through that same performance twice!

The best music video is for Incarnate Solvent Abuse, because it's got some weird latex material that Jeff keeps pulling over himself... eh whatever. They're a great band, but the music videos leave something to be desired. Other grind bands did a better job with their videos.. see "Breed to Breathe" by Napalm Death, or "Ill-Neglect" by Brutal Truth.

On to the live concerts!

The Gods of Grind portion of the video is decent, except it gets repetitive, and as the previous reviewer stated, for some reason it completely fails to focus on Bill Steer, especially annoying when he's doing his fantastically brutal death-grunt vocals. We also miss visuals of a lot of his guitar soloing and ripping fretwork.

The song selection is awesome, except we keep getting treated to the same songs throughout this DVD. (2 Incarnate Solvent Abuse, 2 Corporal Jigsore Quandary, 2 Exhume to Consume... etc)

Another component lacking from the live concerts is any real crowd shots. We have no real idea of how large the crowds are, who's in them, and how crazy they're going..

The Grindcrusher portion of the DVD finishes things off, which is actually the highlight of the entire DVD. This was from 1989, before Amott joined the band, so it's cool to watch how the three-piece of Jeff, Bill and Ken create an incredibly full sound.

They play mostly songs from Symphonies... which means it's roaringly heavy, and we get to watch a fair amount of Ken blasting away. Another interesting piece is that Jeff uses a pitch-shifted mic half the time, and goes back and forth between his normal grating rasp, and a ridiculously evil sounding sub-bass pitch.


Honestly though, what this DVD lacks most is any kind of candid interview or documentary of the band members. If it included any interview at all, or just some behind-the-scenes material, i'd definitely bump it up a good 20-25 points.

As it is, it has a lot of faults, and it gets pretty difficult to sit through the entire hour and forty minutes of nonstop repetitive performances/music videos.

That said, this IS Carcass, and the music is fantastic (goes without saying).. so it's definitely got its exciting and entertaining moments, probably moreso if you've never seen any of these music videos, which are mostly good for the novelty.

65/100

This is the way a Metal DVD should be done: Two full concerts, and a bunch of music videos that you will never see on television.

March 18th, 1992 - London Astoria - 'Gods Of Grind' tour -

Much of Necroticism is played in this set, with a few Symphonies Of Sickness era stuff thrown in also...great setlist overall, and the band plays them with much joy. Great shots of everyone, but sometimes at the wrong times...Throughout the show, when Bill does his vocal parts, the camera is never on him, if I remember correctly on Exume To Consume, we rarely see him, and he has a huge part in the vocals of that song. There is a great part in the beginning of Tools of the Trade showing both Bill and Jeff doing the vocals though. Not a huge problem, but it could have been edited better. Another thing that is worth a mention is some wacky video fuckups...every once in a while you'll see a big white bar on the screen for a split second, or those registration bars...again, not a huge problem since the audio is still there.

November 14, 1989 - Nottingham Rock City - 'Grindcrusher' tour -

They were touring their second album on this one, so all the songs are from the first two albums...great selection and great preformance, and for something recorded in 1989, good quality video and sound. Minor video fuckups in the beginning, but nothing to shit your pants over. Unlike the previous show, the camera is on either Bill or Jeff a second or two before they gurgle the lyrics into the microphone, which is cool.

The five music videos on this DVD are cool...but like most music videos...they are just that..'cool'....the real meat of this DVD are the two live shows.

And another thing that I was glad to see (or not see in this case) are those stupid video effects some bands do to their live show releases...like slow motion, weird colors, schizo camera work, etc...none of that here...just straight up CARCASS.