Prog Review 20: New Blood Deluxe Edition - Peter Gabriel

it's one o'clock and time for lunch

and welcome to episode 20 of prog review and i will be looking at

this handsome addition to my music collection this is peter gabriel's new

blood live in london earbook if you've not seen my unboxing video i suggest you

queue back in my playlist and look at how scrumptious it all is it's a four disc

edition you've got a blu-ray dvd which duplicate each other's content content of him playing at

am smith apollo earlier in 2011

the third disc

is a cd which is new blood the studio album which was released recently and the fourth disc is live

blood it's a live cd culled from the from the blu-ray slash dvd take on the blu-ray first

excellent picture quality fantastic in hd as you can imagine sound quality is it is you know pretty

top notch no can no complaints with that i mean it's

really

is um really worth watching if you if you missed the gig i mean i didn't go to that concert because

the tickets were too expensive but um but yeah um i was really impressed with the with the quality

some of it's a bit hokey in places because you know there was a 3d edition of it and sometimes

you know peter gable wiggles his finger at you and there's some strange incongruous shots which

i guess were designed for those of you with the 3d goggles on um

which kind of uh you know stand out sometimes and also some of the choice of shot um have been

you know a bit out of place you know you can tell that he's not actually singing he's kind of

they've kind of put um shots of gabriel that aren't matched to the vocals you know

probably for the better camera angle on a separate night and so sometimes his voice

his mouth movements don't always match the vocal parts but that's me being a pedantic cunt

um so um but yeah i thought it was really nice uh blu-ray the dvd is the same if you've got

a blu-ray player you've got the dvd in there it's the same content um again if you missed it it's

it's you know it's it's really it's a really good thing um again my my main problem with the whole

orchestral uh rock genre is sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't

work and in the case of peter cable's music there are moments when it works really well

uh for example um san jacinto uh rhythm of the heat red rain

i i think that they work really well with the orchestral backing other tracks intruder complete

with very perverse heavy breathing i thought he was having a asthma attack um uh what other one

darkness i don't know

darkness wasn't too bad digging in the dirt that was it the the amazing

whip crack effect uh to punctuate the downbeat it loses some of its power and you know i felt

didn't quite work in the orchestral setting but some of the other stuff we did you know mercy

street blood of eden i thought was sublime really enjoyed that um so yeah for me some

of the orchestral stuff works and some of the orchestral stuff doesn't work

the funny thing is is with the new blood studio recording because you haven't got so much music

to get through it works a lot better i thought it was a much more cohesive album than the actual live

set if i'd have been sitting at the live concert i'd have probably gnawed one of my legs off in

boredom but the new blood album um sounds really good and hearing it in stereo on the old headphones

you know you can hear the texture there's a lot of texture in the orchestral texture

which is um very satisfying and gabriel's vocals again as he's got older they've become deeper

more mellifluous and you know the very very they really do work well within the orchestral setting

um yes i mean i actually i think the actual album the new blood album was probably the most

satisfying part of the box set for me um i think the actual album the new blood album was probably the most satisfying part of the box set for me

live blood again it just tracks taken off this the

the blu-ray dvd you know they're all right i mean you know some of the choices are a bit

odd i mean again they put digging in the dirt on which i didn't quite enjoy um

but you know they've got rhythm of the heat mercy street uh san jacinto on there as well

i mean you know it's all right but you don't really need it if you've got the blu-ray and the dvd

sorry about the edit, my amazingly naff webcam

failed up on me again, so

let me rewind

DVD

and also the track selection

it's a bit strange

if you're going to have the Blu-ray DVD, why not have a double

CD with all the live tracks on it

go the whole way, rather than giving this anemic looking

live set, you know what it's like lads, you've got to be all in

you've got to be up to your nuts in it, rather than

only going in at half cocked even

if you know what I mean, so yeah I thought the actual

live Blood CD was a bit of a missed opportunity, a bit of a damp squib in the

set, now I mean for me I actually changed my

opinion of the whole orchestral thing, when I originally heard

Gabriel's last project, the Scratch My Balls

did I say balls, sorry, Scratch My Back album

I was a little underwhelmed by it

it was a set of covers, I'm not sure if you're familiar with it

but Gabriel covered some of his favourite songs and it was all done in an orchestral setting

when I heard that he was going to be doing a cover album I thought it was going to be

great, but when I actually listened to it

it was just like a flat line, everything to me sounded the same

there was no dynamics, everything kind of just went on

by the time I think Street Spirit Fade Out by Radiohead was the last track

by the time I got to that I wanted to do some damage to myself

so when this

new Blood thing was announced I thought oh no, not again

but it's quite good, I think Gabriel

was as scared to adapt his own work

I think he was a bit scared to take liberties with the covers album

because it was other people's material, so maybe he didn't want to take any chances

but with this album I think his own interpretation will work a bit better

of course, some of the tracks work better than others

but again, that's only my opinion and I'm sure you'll disagree

you might like the orchestral take, you might not if you disagree

there's a comment box, agree, disagree

thumbs up, thumbs down, you know the routine

subscribe, yeah we've got to do the subscribe thing

everybody does the subscribe thing

subscribe if you like it, if you don't like it

unsubscribe, no, maybe I shouldn't be saying that

get your friends to subscribe, only your clean

good looking friends, we don't want those smelly ugly people

we only want the nice pretty people to be a part of our club

I'm only joking, I'm desperate for friends

please love me

I'm beginning to get off the subject again

I'm beginning to digress back to the box set

now this is £30

you get 200 pages, lots of lovely pictures for you to fondle

and get aroused by

the Blu-ray itself will probably cost about £15

then you've got the actual album, that's another £10, that's £12.99

so £30 bringing all those elements together I thought represents rather good value

you know, probably the best way to sample the whole project

really love the Blu-ray, thought the Blu-ray was excellent

DVD, yeah it's exactly the same

you know, what can you say, it's a really strong collection

of course, you know, by the time the January sales come around

you'll probably get it for half that price

or if you look on eBay there might be some disappointed Peter Gabriel fans

offloading their copies is rather sharpish

but yeah

if you want new blood, the studio album, and you want the Blu-ray slash DVD

you're best off picking this up

so yeah

so that's it, I've come to the end, I need to give it a

I need to give it a rating, I'm going to give this one

because it's so strong, it is a strong collection

even though there's some bits I'm not too keen on

you know, it does feel fairly complete

I'm going to give this 5 wallflowers out of 5

that's 5 wallflowers out of 5

and that is that

my name's been Darren Locke

you've been pissing up the neighbours door again haven't you

and yeah, we're at the end

um, I don't think there's anything else

have I forgotten something?

oh yeah, there's a little voting thing on the main channel

where you can make your suggestions and you can vote up or vote down

down you might want to make some suggestions of what you want me to look

at and then you can thumbs up thumbs down on that we're getting Hawkwind we're

getting focus I think yes and King Crimson also been mentioned somewhere

along the line and I will do my best to crack on if I can get this little webcam

working properly rather than using my big rig I'd do more of these videos a lot

quicker with the big rig I have to convert everything because using iMac

everything has to be converted into the format that stupid think and read and so

it takes forever whereas using my little dinky webcam that doesn't work too well I

can just import everything into into the video editing program without converting

so it saves me a lot of time but yeah make your suggestions try and get me

some more subscribers please you know post some links on some forums because

I'm incredible

lazy I'm not very good at promoting myself so I'm gonna need you guys to

help me out and that's that I hope you've had a good weekend might not been

too bad I've been working through this and let's see what the week brings us

you know there's the door you better prog on

you