The Fleshtones: Live At Hurrah!

"Anyone who has ever seen the Fleshtones knows that when this band gets rolling, the party has started, but this DVD is a bit like hearing a bash that's going on halfway down the block, with some of the details swallowed up by the distance. The Fleshtones: Live at the Hurrah Club was taken from a single-camera shoot at the now-defunct New York City nightspot Hurrah, and transferred to disc in its original full-frame aspect ratio of 1.33:1. The image quality is frequently dim and muddy, the musicians sometimes get lost in the shadows, the camerawork doesn't follow the band especially well, and light smears often pockmark the image. To fancy up the low-tech picture, a number of post-production effects have been used (splitting the image into multiple screens and framing the picture into a picture of an old TV set are the favorites), which distract far more than they help. The audio has been mastered in Dolby Digital Stereo and appears to have been taken from the soundboard output for the concert; the balance is often a bit off, and the vocals frequently get lost in the mix. The songs are performed in English, with no multiple language options or subtitles included. Along with the Hurrah show, five bonus songs have been thrown in from a show for the Manhattan music paper New York Rocker, featuring Clem Burke of Blondie on drums, and while the quality isn't appreciably better, the rarity of the covers the band reels off at least makes this more interesting for hard-core fans. Someone needs to document the phenomenon of a great Fleshtones live show on film one of these days, and Live at the Hurrah Club is a reminder of just how much more this great band deserves than what this disc delivers."