Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

Ok, let’s start by saying I just turned forty-two.  I’m old enough to be a parent to almost every one of the fans at this show, older even than most of the parents who occasionally slip in and out of frame as the cameras pan the first couple rows of the audience.  The parents… they’re mostly just standing there stoic and bemused chaperones, hoping they can keep their kids safe and morally intact all hell breaks loose up on the stage.  The kids are rapt, holding line-for-line on every note and I, Grandpa Bob, am right there with them… because the truth of the matter is I, like them, absolutely love the Dresden Dolls!

The show that makes up Live at the Roundhouse, London is one of the stops on the Dresden Dolls’ tour in support of their second album, “Yes Virginia…”  which is a solid sophomore effort, but not nearly as groundbreaking as the band’s 2004 self-titled debut which turned the Boston-area duo into cult heroes with the hits Coin Operated Boy and Girl Anachronism.  The crowd, with the exception of the parents in the front row who look like they would rather be anywhere else, is stoked to the point of giddiness throughout.  It’s  a group almost an order of magnitude larger than the bunch who showed up for the show that made up their first DVD (2005’s “Paradise”), but to be fair, you could probably fit Boston’s Paradise Lounge inside the Roundhouse – they were both capacity shows, just different capacities.

For those of you not in the know, The Dresden Dolls is a Boston area duo made up of Amanda Palmer (piano, vocals) and Brian Viglione (drums, acoustic guitar).  Calling their act ‘Punk Cabaret,’ their sound is somewhere between Punk and Pop and their look somewhere between Goth and performance art.  What has always blown me away about them is that though they are only two, they have a big – BIG – sound.   Palmer’s smoky, not-so-polished vocals play well with her not-so-polished piano style and Viglione…  well, he is nothing short of an amazing drummer and great fun to listen to, not to mention watch.  In concert, Palmer doesn’t so much play her piano as beat the living hell out of it while Viglione is just spot-on percussively (check out his performance on Mandy Goes to Med School if you don’t believe me) and, as might come to a surprise to some of the casual fans, he’s pretty impressive with a guitar as well.

Palmer’s voice is a little worse for wear as the show recorded for this DVD is well into the tour, but while she sounds a little more husky than usual, she still pulls off an impressive performance.  The raspiness is really mostly noticeable when she’s talking rather than singing, but obviously she’s a bit road-worn for this show.  I’ve never really understood why bands wait until the last part of a tour to do a live recording – yeah, they have the songs down as well as they’re going to get them, but they often sound like crap!  Not crap in this case, just an observation – like I said, she pulled off a pretty good performance despite the ‘road rash’.  Viglione on the other hand looks like he could do another two or three shows that night standing on his head.  He’s a real power house and his performance is worth the price of admission all by itself.

The sound quality of the DVD is excellent as is the quality of the video, though the camera work has the shaky, almost sloppy air of a bootleg that, were it any other band, would probably detract from the rest of the show, but in this case, works.  There’s a lot of choreographed, avante garde performance art-type dancing and cavorting going on throughout the show both on and off the stage and I’m not really sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing.  It’s cool for the DVD, but distracting and I have to wonder if it was even moreso (distracting) for those at the venue.  The audience seems to like it though, especially the Marilyn Monroe-like dancers who took center stage – in the audience – during the haunting “Lonesome Organist Rapes Page Turner.”  So I guess I’ll just accept that maybe you just had to be there.

As expected in an album support tour, the show is made up predominantly of songs from “Yes Virginia…” but there are more than a few tracks culled from their first album, along with a couple of covers here and there to round things out.    The stand-out tracks are really the opener, Sex Changes, Backstabber and Mandy Goes to Med School from “Yes Virginia…” along with the venerable Coin Operated Boy and Girl Anachronism from their debut album.  Sing, the first single from “Yes Virginia,” is on there too. It’s the band’s most commercial, radio-ready song and the audience really falls all over themselves over it… a great closer which includes sparklers instead of lighters held high in the audience and an endig that really DOES look like half the audience is on stage!   

The highlight of the show for me is during the encore when special guest Trash McSweeney of the Australian band the Red Paintings joins the Dolls onstage for a semi-acoustic version of Tears for Fears Mad World.  This version of one of my favorite songs is much more closely aligned with the Gary Jules version that was featured on the Donny Darko movie soundtrack.  It’s an absolutely chilling rendition of a great song, tastefully performed by McSweeney and the Dolls.

There’s plenty of audience participation in the show making it a fun time for all who were there and not a bad watch for the rest of us.  An example of this participation is when it seems like half the audience ends up on stage in full crazy goth/punk/cabaret regalia to sing backing vocals on The Jeep Song.  It’s great fun and even Amanda, who probably did the same thing every night, couldn’t help giggling a couple times as a bunch of fans got the opportunity of their young lives and didn’t make a bad showing for themselves!

There’s plenty of bonus material on the disc too and I’m not going to go into it too much so that if you go from this review to your local video shop you’ll have something to surprise you  – but there are some extra songs and interview/documentary footage to keep you busy. 

All in all this is a very well-done package.  I have to admit I was a bit surprised to see another live DVD this soon after the last one – after all, I thought, what more can they do – but they do this one justice, putting on a great show that really is worthy of its own DVD release.  Those who don’t get the Dresden Dolls – and there are a lot of them out there, many even younger than me (ha), probably aren’t going to have a light bulb go off after watching this, but for fans, Live at the Roundhouse is a must-have.