Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

Mumford & Sons: The Road to Red Rocks Blu-ray Movie Review

Sigh no more, Mumford has arrived on Blu-ray.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 7, 2013

How many so-called British Invasions can we poor Americans endure? The sixties were awash in British bands that challenged Americans’ presumed sovereignity to rule over their own music charts, with The Beatles leading the charge. While The Beatles paved the way for a number of other groups like The Rolling Stones and Herman’s Hermit’s, the British onslaught continued unabated even after The Beatles bade us all adieu as a cohesive performing unit. The late sixties and entire decade of the seventies saw a new influx of incredibly popular British outfits, including such iconic bands as Pink Floyd (which had of course been around for years before they hit the megaselling big time with The Dark Side Of The Moon in 1973) and Yes. The eighties saw the rise of the British synthpop movement, with relatively short-lived phenomena like The Human League and Culture Club topping the charts. Longer lasting artists like The Police and Eurythmics also sprang up, in turn spawning major solo acts like Sting and Annie Lennox. During the end of this phase the British Soul movement gained a foothold in the states, giving huge hits to such artists as Lisa Stansfield. Things have continued apace in our still young new millennium, with a glut of British artists becoming incredibly popular on this side of the pond, led by such artists as Adele, who seems poised to win an Academy Award in a couple of weeks for her contributions to Skyfall. But one of the most unusual British bands to gain international acclaim recently is certainly Mumford and Sons, a folk unit that harkens back (way back, some might say) to a simpler time in the music scene when artists like The Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul and Mary dominated the charts. Now, this is not to say that Mumford and Sons sounds even slightly like either of those acts, but there’s still a preference for acoustic instrumentation and generally unadorned harmonic structures that makes the band’s music both immediately accessible as well as perhaps unexpectedly ingratiating quite a bit of the time.

One of the things that’s so interesting about Mumford and Sons is how genre bashing the band really is, even within the confines of its generally rootsy, folksy sound. With massed strumming and picking on a variety of guitars and banjoes, one might expect Mumford and Sons to sound like an updated version of Flatt and Scruggs, but there is really an unexpectedly wide range of influences the course through the band’s music. One of the most remarkable things about Mumford and Sons is their intelligent, heartfelt lyric writing, an approach that to my ears at least is reminiscent (at least at times) of the literary bent in some of U2’s pieces.

We’ve had a lot of supposedly “reimagined” concert videos on Blu-ray over the past couple of years or so, outings that want to pretend they’re giving the viewer intimate backstage looks at their focal artists, but which just as often as not seem completely staged and, frankly, overly contrived. There’s no doubt that some of these “concert” videos do offer some at least relatively unvarnished and unrehearsed glimpses at the various acts (Adele: Live at the Royal Albert Hall and Coldplay Live 2012 spring instantly to mind in this regard—and just to drive home a point, these are both British acts). But my personal hunch is many people who flock to this live concert videos are coming for the music, not the “gossip”, and while Mumford and Sons: The Road to Red Rocks does have at least a little tangential material dotting the premises, it is first and foremost a document of an actual concert.

The band is instrumentally quite impressive throughout this concert, perhaps just slightly less so from a vocal standpoint. While the harmonies are often quite lush and well layered, there’s a certain ragged quality here at times, perhaps by choice, but perhaps just as easily resulting from the rigors of the road. The setting, however, is amazing. If you’ve never seen Red Rocks, this concert offers several awe inspiring views of the truly incredible vistas of Colorado. Even in the encroaching darkness, the sight of the huge slabs of sandstone looming around and over the immense audience give this concert a majestic feeling that’s hard to ignore.

Mumford and Sons: The Road to Red Rocks includes the following songs:

• 01. Lovers’ Eyes
• 02. Little Lion Man
• 03. Below My Feet
• 04. Roll Away Your Stone
• 05. Lover of the Light
• 06. Thistle & Weeds
• 07. Ghosts That We Knew
• 08. Awake My Soul
• 09. Whispers in the Dark
• 10. Dust Bowl Dance
• 11. I Will Wait
• 12. The Cave

Mumford & Sons: The Road to Red Rocks Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Mumford and Sons: The Road to Red Rocks is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Glassnote Records with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 2.39:1. (Interestingly, this release also bears a Universal Music Group imprint, but the Universal logo does not feature the traditional Universal logo music.) This is generally a very nice looking high definition presentation, at least when it's focused on the players on the stage, which is more often than not well lit and offers decent views of the band. Things tend to ge progressively less easy to see, however, as the night wears on, something that makes the shots of Red Rocks and the audience increasingly murkier. Unfortunately, the stage lighting also becomes less aggressive as well, leading to overwhelmingly looming shadows falling across vast areas of the stage, leading to a rather drastic loss of shadow detail if not outright crush. The good news here is there were obviously a lot of cameras in attendance that night, and the concert is extremely well covered from a variety of angles, and the close-ups offer some very pleasing fine detail. Despite the interlaced presentation, there are few if any combing artifacts, even in close-ups of complex strumming patterns.

Mumford & Sons: The Road to Red Rocks Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Mumford and Sons: The Road to Red Rocks features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 that offers superior fidelity and some excellently rendered depth and breadth, no doubt heightened due to the impressive outdoor "arena" in which the band is performing. The band tends to mass its instrumental voicings in the midrange, with layered guitars and other stringed instruments like banjoes, but the audio mix here is really very nicely clean and uncrowded sounding in this regard, with each instrument and pattern clearly presented. There are occasional very minor balance issues between the voices and the instruments, seemingly less from microphone or mixing problems and perhaps due (as described above) to some perhaps tired singers occasionally not having quite enough energy. For the record, this Blu-ray also offers an uncompressed LPCM 2.0 stereo fold down which some may actually prefer since it tends to get the vocals out in front of the band in a more focused fashion. There's also a standard lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 mix included. (One niggling question: why do so many of these releases default to the stereo option rather than the surround? It would be my assumption that most people buying a concert release like this would want to hear it in its full surround glory.)

Mumford & Sons: The Road to Red Rocks Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Perhaps surprisingly, there are no supplements at all included on this Blu-ray disc.

Mumford & Sons: The Road to Red Rocks Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Mumford and Sons: The Road to Red Rocks is a really enjoyable concert outing that finds the band in mostly fine form, especially with regard to their really appealing instrumental capabilities. The incredible setting, though it's a bit hard to see as the night goes on, also provides a compelling added attraction to the visual allure of this concert outing. This has relatively fewer "bells and whistles" than a lot of recent concert videos, but with great sounding music like this, that's probably a good thing. With generally fine video and audio, and despite a lack of supplementary material, Mumford and Sons: The Road to Red Rocks comes Recommended.