Armor For Sleep

A Comprehensive Guide To Touring DVD

Written by: PP on 25/12/2005 03:38:58

Armor For Sleep rose from being 'that cool scene band everyone knows' into the attention of the mainstream medias like Kerrang! TV and MTV2 during the past 12 months. "A Comprehensive Guide To Touring" is the band's first DVD - third release overall - and it quite literally lets you join the band on road to witness the absurd everyday happenings on tour.

The DVD gives an in-depth view of how each day looks like on a Armor For Sleep tour with constant joking around, annoying their drummer Nash, doing pranks, destroying hotels and having food wars and playfights with the other bands on tour. Every now and then there's a moment where you can't avoid laughing out loud, such as when their frontman Ben keeps on asking Nash whether or not he wants "The Needler", which in practise means whether or not he wants to be poked with a giant needle on his throat, face or arm, quickly followed by a swarm of pillows heading straight into the direction of his head, and this is all while he's playing blockade on his sidekick in the moving van. You can't help but laugh at the stupidity and immaturity of the things these kids do while they're drunk on tour, and sometimes things can get quite serious like when a venue manager accuses them of wrecking the backstage room and refuses to let them back in to retrieve their stuff. Fortunately, an incredibly drunk, blurred out 'sound-guy' reveals that the manager was pulling the story out of his ass.

The bonus content of the disc isn't much to hooray for, though I did enjoy watching the snippets of shows at all major cities they played on their US tour. However, the MTV style "see my room, this is where I live" of each band member was relatively useless, just like the slideshow of tour pictures and the odd "Bonus footage", which didn't differ from the main film at all.

All this being said, it's a perfect DVD for a die-hard Armor For Sleep fan who's been to several shows and is just that bit more interested in the bands life on tour. You get to witness how big of culture shock it was for the band on their UK tour, and you get to meet the crazy tour manager who keeps on getting his stuff stolen. But to someone like me, who enjoys Armor For Sleep but wouldn't be able to name more than just a few songs from the top of my head, most of the DVD was not as interesting as I had hoped to. The DVD includes nearly no live-footage except for the short, 5-10 second clips from each show, but what I really wanted to see was one show's worth of songs played live, especially because they had the camera filming them on each show. Judging from the small clippets, the band seems to be an awesome live act, and it's a shame they miss out the opportunity to capture the energy and spirit of their live show on a video format.

As a final note, I have to admit that watching the DVD got me a lot more into the band than I was before, and it lead into a couple of thorough listens of their two albums almost straight after. Bonus points for having music by the likes of Gatsby's American Dream, The Academy Is..., and Circa Survive accompanying the last 15 minutes of the DVD.

6

Download: DVD format
For the fans of: Armor For Sleep, Gatsbys American Dream

Release date 21.11.2005
Equal Vision
Provided by Target ApS

Related Items | How we score?
Comments
comments powered by Disqus

Legal

© Copyright MMXXIV Rockfreaks.net.