Anywhere but home

Last fall Evanescence pumped out a live cd / dvd set from their tour for their only mainstream album, FALLEN. Since my wife and I had seen them perform three times here in NY I thought it would be nice to have this. My wife puts Evanescence in her top five fav rock bands so I got this set for her for Christmas.

We only got to watch it last weekend.

The live cd is okay, or so I'm told. Amy Lee's voice wasn't as "on the mark" as she usually is, but the rest of the band do a great job. The dvd is a little harder to take. The person behind the cinematography should have his hands cut off. You can get more sea-sick from watching this than from The Blair Witch Project.

That aside, the band performed well. This was filmed in Paris after Ben Moody's departure, so you get to see the guy they stole from COLD playing lead guitars. BTW: He's also Amy Lee's boyfriend. Makes you wonder if there was other motivations involved in him landing that job. Amy Lee actually looks rather sexy in this. Of the three times we saw them in concert she only looked hot the first time. Plus I saw her on the street before the show without her make-up. Holy shit! She has serious skin problems. But that's neither here, nor there...

Interesting points:

They performed Thoughtless by Korn. It seemed worse than when we saw them. They did NOT have Zero by Smashing Pumpkins on the dvd, which we saw them perform... badly. She has a great voice but she's not really compatible with that sort of music. Plus the drums have a low level and he sounded terrible on Zero.

Back to the dvd, they performed either a very old song, or a brand new song. I wasn't familiar with it and it was boring so I won't dwell on it.

Oddly, they camera seemed to focus (if you can call that focus) mostly on Amy and that bloated lard-assed drummer. I was wondering if that was on purpose. Maybe if they show a lot of that elephantine percussionist it would make Amy seem more attractive.

It worked.

I think they showed the bassist for less than two seconds, the rhythm guitarist showed up mostly during "Bring Me To Life." Amy's boyfriend, who looks like a rasta version of Stuttering John Melendez, got a lot screen time too. Luckily not his face too often.

All in all, I would recommend saving your money and steer clear of this set. It's very disappointing especially if you've actually seen them perform. They taped their worst performance on the tour evidently.

Don't support shoddy work, save your cash.