Live DVDs from My Chemical Romance and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown.
MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE
The Black Parade Is Dead!
Reprise
****
Slowly but surely, US punk/goth/rock act My Chemical Romance have engineered their success to such a degree that they remain the touchstone for a certain section of largely disaffected teenagers.
Their peak to date is The Black Parade(2006), a multimillion-selling concept album of sorts about such cheerful topics as alienation and death. Now fans can see it performed in all its glory on this quite tasty DVD/CD.
The CD is a live one (13 tracks culled from a concert in Mexico City), but the superbly conceived and directed DVD is the one to go for: a surge of cracking contemporary rock that crackles with passion.
Two disparate shows were filmed; The Big Kahuna is in Mexico City's arena venue, Palacio de los Deportes, but the better by far is in the far smaller Maxwell's Club, in New Jersey's Hoboken.
Whatever comes next for MCR is open to conjecture; all the more reason, then, to kick back and plug in.
[ www.mychemicalromance.comOpens in new window ]
TONY CLAYTON-LEA
CLARENCE "GATEMOUTH" BROWN
Austin City Limits: Live from Austin Tx
New West
***
This Louisiana-born, Texas-raised, pipe-smoking multi-instrumentalist (who died in 2005 at 81 of heart disease and lung cancer) was called "Gatemouth" because of his big, booming voice.
A versatile musician who easily stepped across country, blues, zydeco, calypso and more besides, Brown was a formidable presence on stage. This is, perhaps, less obviously stated here (recorded for the Austin City Limitstelevision series and now available on DVD for the first time), but there's no doubting the man's versatility.
If you're looking for someone who can mix-and-match blues, funk, honky-tonk, Cajun, jazz and rhythm & blues in a way that fuses warmth and low-key panache, then here he is.
Minus point: there ain't no sign of Brown's trademark instrumental show-stopper, Okie Dokie Stomp. No extras either.
TONY CLAYTON-LEA
