Goldfinger – Live At The House Of Blues (The Show Must Go Off) [DVD]

I am a big Goldfinger fan, so when I heard that Kung Fu Records was recording a live DVD of the band for their The Show Must Go Off series, I was ecstatic. But as soon as I started watching the eleventh installment in the series I was disappointed. Right from the start, lead singer John Feldmann’s vocals were much weaker then I expected. They were harsh and sounded tired and exhausted. I guess after playing shows for nearly a decade, it makes sense that your voice would degenerate a bit, but I was still taken aback from it. Secondly, the film quality wasn’t nearly as good as the previous episodes in the series. It was much darker and somewhat grainy at times, which disrupted my viewing pleasure several times.

Even though they only play a small set of only 14 songs, they are able to hit on many of their classics like Superman, Open Your Eyes, Mable (where everyone got the chance to join the band on stage), Fuck Ted Nugent, Counting The Days, Sam Simeon, Miles Away, Wayne Gretzky, Here In Your Bedroom and more. Hearing these songs again reminded me of just how good this band really is. I mean, I haven’t listened to them in well over 8 months but I am still able to recall 90% of the words and sing along with these classic songs. Closing the set, they play their most popular track, 99 Red Balloons, and left everyone wanting more from the band. By that time even I had forgotten about the video quality and vocals.

Goldfinger knows how to entertain their fans and give them their money’s worth. John starts the show of in a suit and ends it topless and drenched in sweat after running around, singing crazily and crowd surfing numerous times. Keeping the tradition alive, Dangerous Darrin let one lucky fan member eat a twinkie out of his ass and then went on to share the treat.

Having a short set enabled Kung Fu Records to put a lot more extra features into the disc as well, something which has been lacking in recent episodes of The Show Must Go Off. Like all the shows, they have a band commentary, links, credits and a photo gallery; although this time the photo gallery is from a mixture of shows, not just the one shown on the DVD. But they don’t stop there, they also have information onPETA with a very disturbing and mind-opening video for their animal rights song, Free Me. Finally, there is also the extra part, where they have some more live footage from various concerts over the past years and has the band just messing around doing stupid things. This is very amusing to watch and easily makes up for the short set.

Despite a few quarks in the vocals and image quality; Goldfinger Live At The House Of Blues is a great DVD. They are more then able to make up for the little glitches by adding more extra features, something which has been missing from previous releases in the series.