The New Director's Cut (DVD)
MVD Visual, 2008
REVIEW BY: Jason Warburg
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 09/27/2008
Another Yes DVD? Really?
Indeed. This time around, in typically convoluted fashion, the iconic prog-rock band gets the full-length concert DVD treatment courtesy of the same production team that brought you the Yes documentary DVD Yesspeak a couple of years back. That release interspersed extensive interviews with all five “Classic Yes” principals – Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, Rick Wakeman and Alan White – with concert footage from the Birmingham, England stop on the group’s 2003 35th Anniversary tour. The emphasis on Yesspeak, however, was on the interviews, with the performance footage restricted to brief snippets and interludes.
The New Director’s Cut reverses the roles of the two components of Yesspeak and presents the entire live set from Yes’ July 3, 2003 set at Birmingham N.I.A., with brief clips from the interviews spliced in as occasional color commentary. Potential buyers should note that the setlist here is identical to that of last fall’s Live At Montreux 2003 DVD, as the band did not vary its setlist night to night on their 2003 European tour (they even wear the same outfits in both…). The sound mixing and video editing are perhaps a little better on this DVD than on Montreux, but there’s not a tremendous difference in quality in either direction.
What you’re left with, then, is the quality of the performances themselves, which are – as usual – quite good. The latter-day version of “Siberian Khatru” might lack the youthful drive of the original in its opening minutes, but the fire the band displays in the lengthy closing jam is undeniable. Classic cuts like “And You And I,” “Heart Of The Sunrise” and “I’ve Seen All Good People” receive similarly enthusiastic treatment, interspersed with newer (and lesser) works like “Magnification” and “”in The Presence Of.”
The two highlights for this viewer are “South Side Of The Sky,” a complex album cut from Fragile that was rescued from obscurity by the band around 2000 and given a dynamite reading, and “Awaken.” The latter is in fact the one lengthy opus the band performed on this particular tour, and their reading of it here is right on the mark, which is to say nearly transcendent. That said, I’d have preferred hearing/seeing “Close To The Edge” performed to sitting through the solo selections allotted for each member.
The second DVD in this package, after finishing up the tail end of the
The latter sounds like it might be a great addition – after all, you know it’ll be a big crowd and the set was truncated to exclude all those superfluous solos. However, Yes’ set at
The New Director’s Cut doesn’t really offer a whole lot that’s new and different for the Yes fan, but it’s at least nice to have the Yesspeak concert footage available in this more music-centric form. With the uncertainty surrounding the band’s future at the moment, it’s also good to have the Classic Yes lineup well-documented in its still-considerable latter-day glory.