Amazing
Grace
(2022 compilation/Country/Gospel/Time Life DVD Set)/Flintrock:
The Albums
(1975 - 1979/Pinnacle/7T's/Cleopatra/CD Set)/Howard
Jones Live In Japan
(1984/DVD + CD Set/both Cherry Red Records UK)/Tubular
Bells 50th Anniversary Tour
(2022/Cleopatra Blu-ray Set)/Wendy
O. Williams: Live and #%$ing! Loud From London
(1985/DVD/both MVD)
Picture:
C+/X/C+/B-/C Sound: C+/B-*/B-/C+/C+ Extras: C+/C/C+/B/D
Main Programs: C+/B-/B-/B-/C+
PLEASE
NOTE:
The Flintrock
CD set and Howard
Jones
DVD/CD Set Imports are now only available from our friends at Cherry
Red Records UK and can be ordered from the links below.
Now
for some major musical blasts from the past....
We
start with yet another expansive DVD music box set from Time Life,
who's made a reputation out of such sets and this time, instead of
focusing on a single TV series, we get Amazing
Grace,
taking its many clips from several sources to show how expansive
gospel music and its connection to country music is. The singers &
musicians here include Reba McIntyre, George Jones, Dolly Parton,
Alan Jackson, The Oak Ridge Boys, Alabama, Randy Travis, Brenda Lee,
Vince Gill, Ronnie Milsap, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Kris Kristofferson,
The Statler Brothers, Willie Nelson, Josh Turner, T. Graham Brown,
Marty Stuart, Rhonda Vincent, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Gene Watson,
Bill Anderson, B.J. Thomas, Jeannie Sealy, Barbara Fairchild, Ricky
Scaggs, George Jones, Porter Wagner Johnny Cash, Barbara Mandrell,
Martina McBride, Roy Acuff, Skeeter Davis, Ernest Tubb, Roy Clark,
Charlie Pride and Loretta Lynn.
No
doubt the set has plenty of credibility and fans of both music genres
will consider this a solid treasury with hours and hours of clips
they have never seen before or not for a very long time. About every
gospel song I could think of is here and I am not a big fan of this
genre, so those in my camp will find it more massive than they need
it to be. Still, this was a smart idea and a great gift set in time
for the holidays.
Extras
include a high quality booklet on the artists with great
illustrations and a track listing of every single artist and the song
they perform, while the discs add interview clips.
Flintrock:
The Albums
(1975 - 1979) covers all our albums released by the U.K. band who
were a big deal in Britain, Japan and Europe in the mid-1970s with
Pop/Rock bands that were often covered by a cycle of magazines aimed
at teen gals in particular, but the band has the advantage of
appearing on a few hit TV shows (pre-MTV) and for the most part, are
not that bad. The four albums are all they made, including one that
is a live release and you get a few cover songs, but they are also
time capsules of an era sadly long gone.
The
albums are ...On
The Way,
Hot
From The Lock
(the live album), Tears
'N Cheers
and Stand
Alone.
Though the last album sounds best, as you might expect, Cheers
is the best album, which gets better as they go along and shows what
might have been if they had stayed together and stuck to that
direction. I also was surprised by their good taste in their choices
of songs to remake, even if they are not totally successful in their
covers (The Beatles' She's
Leaving Home,
Steely Dan's Rikki
Don't Lose That Number)
but they try.
I
should add that writer/backing vocalist/drummer/timpani/xylophone
player Mike Holoway was becoming a star in his own right as a young
teen actor, including on the hit U.K. TV series The
Tomorrow People
involving children with psychic powers. It was successful enough
that it made it onto some U.S. TV stations and stayed well remembered
and liked enough that A&E Home Video even issued the whole series
a good while ago (see the reviews elsewhere on this site) on two DVD
sets, so you may have seen him before and not known it.
The
bonus tracks and an informative booklet on the band and its history
are the extras and you read about all the details at the order link
below.
Howard
Jones Live In Japan
(1984) is one of the major full-length (aka long form) music concert
programs that seemed to always be in print as soon as it arrived and
was considered demo material for earlier home theater systems in the
analog era with the underrated singer/songwriter/musician singing 14
songs, including great hits like What
is Love?,
Pearl
In the Shell and
New
Song.
What
also helps besides his limitless energy is a great audience who may
be laid back at first, but eventually get into it, but that tends to
be the way Japanese audiences are, though some fans flew and
travelled to be there to the NHK Hall in Tokyo. It is my belief that
Jones is highly underrated and underappreciated, a bit ahead of his
time and people still have not totally caught up with him. This show
adds evidence to my beliefs. Definitely see it or if you have not
seen it in ages, see it again to see how great he was live.
A
small booklet with illustrations and basic information is the only
extra. For more from Jones, try our coverage of this DVD set marking
his 20th
Anniversary
with a 2006 concert:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/3786/Howard+Jones
The
Tubular Bells 50th Anniversary Tour
(2022) celebrates the first album ever issued by the eventually
massive Virgin Records label, made Mike Oldfield an instant name and
helped William Friedkin's classic film The
Exorcist
become an all-time blockbuster. This show ignores the movie, but
performs the entire album as a live show at The Royal Festival Hall
with lights and images that celebrate the work and is narrated by the
solid actor Bill Nighy.
That
makes it a new way to appreciate the music, the album and its legacy,
though some purists might not be as happy as was the case with the
Tubular
Beats
project a few years ago. Still, it is very ambitious and you could
only name so many albums, especially instrumental ones, that would
get this treatment.
Extras
include a Behind The Scenes documentary that runs 90 minutes and
on-camera interview with Mike Oldfield and Virgin Records founder
Richard Branson. For more on the album, try our coverage of the
Tubular
Beats
CD Set:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/12086/Mick+Vs.+Keith:+The+Strange+Case+Of+Jagger
Last
but not least is a Grammy nominee and punk rock legend who left us
too early. Wendy
O. Williams: Live and #%$ing! Loud From London
(1985) is a rare concert fo the singer, performer and wild woman in
action for about an hour performing a dozen songs in non-stop hard
play mode and took place at the Camden Palace in London. Lemmy &
Wurzel from Motorhead also show up to take the craziness up a notch.
Its
the kind of show you were lucky you could find on VHS back in the
day, but it has aged well because Williams is one of the most
important and subversive performers in the history of the genre,
still dangerous as Rap/Hip Hop has become the dominant music genre
and still one of music's most important female artists. If you have
not seen her in action outside of some online video footage, this is
a great crash course (with lots of crashing) to check out.
There
are no extras.
Now
for playback performance. The 1080p 1.78 X 1 digital High Definition
image on the two Bells
Blu-rays deliver the best image by default, especially because they
are the only new recordings and the DVDs are from old analog and
early digital sources. They are mostly of live footage and can lean
blue because that is the way the lighting was made, but they are fine
otherwise. Unfortunately, Cleopatra still insists on using the much
older, lossy
Dolby Digital 5.1 codec for even their newest productions, so this
set suffers like so many before it sonically.
The
1.33 X 1 image transfers on Amazing,
Jones
and Williams
can show the age of the materials used, but this is far superior a
set transfers to all previous releases of these titles. Wherever any
of the Amazing
clips have turned up before, they look as good as they can here, the
Jones
show has been issued in several formats over the years (VHS, Beta,
12-inch LaserDisc, etc.) and looks as good as it can here, while the
Williams
show is roughest of the three and was the least expensive production.
That shows, but its fine for what it is, plus in all cases, you have
to expect some analog
videotape flaws including video noise, video banding, telecine
flicker, tape scratching, cross color, faded color and tape damage.
Williams
is the roughest in those respects, while Amazing
has some later clips that happen to be presented in anamorphically
enhanced 1.78 X 1. DVD sound here is either lossy Dolby Digital 2.0
Mono (Williams,
unless you want to think of it as barely stereo) or Mono & Stereo
(Amazing,)
save Jones
with a PCM 2.0 Stereo DVD and PCM 2.0 16/44.1 Stereo CD that sound
good, but I wish it were even stronger.
*That
leaves the Flintrock CDs, all here in PCM 2.0 16/44.1 Stereo, all
showing their age and when they were recorded, save the last album
(Stand Alone) which lands up having the best sonics of all the
releases here.
To
order the
Flintrock
CD set and/or Howard
Jones
DVD/CD Set imports,
go to these links:
Flintrock
CD set
https://www.cherryred.co.uk/product/flintlock-the-albums-4cd-expanded-box-set/
Howard
Jones
DVD/CD Set imports
https://www.cherryred.co.uk/product/howard-jones-live-at-the-nhk-hall-tokyo-japan-1984-cd-dvd-edition/
-
Nicholas Sheffo