Kasabian Live! - Live at the O2 Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Kasabian Live! - Live at the O2 Blu-ray Movie Review

Inside the Pleasuredome.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 15, 2012

Are musical genres even relevant anymore? The vivisection of the Billboard charts into this nook or that cranny would seem to suggest so, but there are two things working against that theory. First of all, there’s a growing homogeneity to a lot of pop and rock music where whatever “subgenre” it’s supposed to belong to varies by relatively minimal amounts from any other given subgenre. But there is also an increasing tendency by bands and artists to throw as many different styles at the figurative wall, hoping that at least a few of them stick on those selfsame niche defining charts. That may be the case with Kasabian, an English band usually lumped into the catchall “rock” category, but who could be pigeonholed—for a tune or two anyway—into any number of genres, at least as evidenced by Kasabian Live at the 02—London 15/12/2011. (For those not up to speed with the European way of abbreviating dates, no, there isn’t some new fifteenth month—the concert took place on December 15, 2011.) This concert starts out with waves of synth washes as a light show pulses organically overhead, and one could be forgiven if they felt they had wandered into some sort of techno or trance performance. But once the first tune gets underway, a strange concatenation of styles is heard. At times just straight ahead, good old rock and roll, at others an almost proto-rap vocal performance by lead singer Tom Meighan—all of these elements combine to make Kasabian in a very real way uncategorizable, Now all of this doesn’t mean that Kasabian is versatile enough to be convincing or innovative all of the time, and there are elements of their sound which are awfully redolent of any number of other bands, but the good news is that list of bands is pretty diverse, including everything from Deep Purple to Scorpions to even more outré choices like Devo.

London’s O2 is a gigantic (actually gargantuan) complex in London which is about to become even more well known when the Summer Olympics start up. Within the O2 complex is the O2 Arena, the second such largest venue in the United Kingdom, able to hold up to 20,000 people. While it doesn’t appear quite that many attended this Kasabian concert, there is a teeming mass of people that are jumping and hopping about under the domed cover and neatly curved proscenium stage, which gives the feeling at times that all of this is happening within the confines of one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. The band’s technical crew has rather nicely utilized the shape of the O2 itself in framing the lighting and projection array, with a semicircle surrounding the band onstage.

Kasabian makes a case that their 2011 album Velociraptor! was, in their words, the sound of “a band of the future”. Some may argue that it’s a rather retro sounding future, with pulsing synth attacks and a kind of proto- eighties feel at time. In fact, it’s the kind of “future” that is posited in everything from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to George Pal’s The Time Machine, depictions which can strike modern day eyes as being downright quaint. But Kasabian does manage to mix ideas rather fluently, as evidenced by any number of tunes in this set which combine various influences and keep the listener just slightly off kilter, not knowing what idiom is going to be referenced next.

As propulsive as many of Kasabian’s songs are, with relentless bass and drums forging ahead under Meighan’s kind of half-spoken, half-sung vocals, some of the most effective moments in this concert are quieter, more relatively unplugged moments, though these are offset somewhat by the incredibly intrusive sounds of a very loud audience (perhaps due to the O2’s acoustics). The band obviously takes itself fairly seriously (some might argue a bit too seriously, at least based on some of the self-serving comments heard in the Documentary included on this Blu-ray), but that also means that it’s best not to take Kasabian for granted as “just another rock band”. They’re obviously trying to meld various ideas into a cohesive new whole, and the fact is they succeed more often than they don’t.

Kasabian's set list for this concert features:

• 01. Days are Forgotten
• 02. Shoot the Runner
• 03. Velociraptor!
• 04. Underdog
• 05. Where Did All the Love Go?
• 06. I.D.
• 07. I Hear Voices
• 08. Thick as Thieves
• 09. Take Aim
• 10. Clubfoot
• 11. Re-Wired
• 12. Empire
• 13. Le Fée Verte
• 14. Fast Fuse / Misirlou
• 15. Goodbye Kiss
• 16. L.S.F.
• 17. Switchblade Smiles
• 18. Vlad the Impaler
• 19. Fire

Kasabian Live! - Live at the O2 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Kasabian Live! Live At the O2 London 15/12/2011 is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Columbia Records and Eagle Vision (an imprint of Eagle Rock Entertainment) with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 2.35:1. This is a curiously schizophrenic high definition presentation that looks fantastically sharp at times but then devolves into noisy softness at others. Part of the problem here is the very lighting array that probably gave the live concert a lot of its visual allure. In a video setting, however, what happens is we're awash in nearly absolute darkness, with a minimum of shadow detail, and then suddenly strobing starts filling the frame with intermittent light, bringing with it occasional banding and a simple inability to see anything long enough to make out sufficient fine object detail. There's a minimum of posterizing here, a typical bugaboo of so many live concert videos, and in the sequences where there's a modicum of "normal" stage lighting without strobing or other effects, things pop really rather well. But the general feeling most will probably have watching Kasabian is of a middling high definition experience.

Kasabian Live! - Live at the O2 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

How much you like your immersive high definition concert experience to include rabid audience sounds will probably dictate whether you want to opt for Kasabian Live! Live at the O2 London 15/12/2011's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 or LPCM 2.0 mix. While the uncompressed stereo fold down has its share of overwhelming audience noise, the narrower sound field it provides contains the audience sounds and relegates them more relatively to the background (though if you're expecting a concert free of raucous reactions, even this mix will disappoint). The 5.1 mix spreads the audience sounds across the rear channels, as is to be expected, but the mix here is much more immersive, by which I mean that the audience sounds actually overwhelm the band at regular intervals, as if you're right in the middle of the O2 Arena. Some will love that feeling; I personally found it extremely distracting. The good news here is that fidelity on both of these tracks is top notch, able to catch every nuance of the band's multilayered instrumentation and doing a fine job for the most part of delivering Meighan's vocals over the rest of the cacophony. Dynamic range isn't especially wide here, since the band tends to favor over the top rock outings rather than more introspective ballads and acoustic fare.

Kasabian Live! - Live at the O2 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Documentary (HD; 29:01). This is a fairly interesting look behind the scenes, including a nice extended peek at the logistics of setting up the giant dome like light array, which is referred to here as a sort of "neon church". While some of the posturing of the band members, who refer to themselves as modern shamans and the like, are at the very least pretentious, it's still fascinating to see the actual technology being developed and utilized for this concert.

Kasabian Live! - Live at the O2 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Kasabian has been burning up the European charts now for several years, and they've had their songs featured in everything from Tony Hawk video games to the old J.J. Abrams series Alias, but my hunch is they're still a relatively unknown quantity on this side of the pond (even with a couple of their singles having cracked the U.S. Top 40). This concert video shows the band to be a high energy outfit that easily traverses a rather wide spectrum of styles and influences. The O2 Arena is an imposing edifice and the band has crafted a visually arresting show that was probably more viscerally exciting in person that it appears on this Blu-ray. The on again, off again video quality here is offset by great audio, albeit audio full of boisterous audience sounds, and the accompanying Documentary is also interesting. Recommended.