Various Artist – The Eastpak Resistance Tour Volume III [DVD]

Sweet Jesus, this thing is longwinded.

It’s a DVD featuring a bunch of hardcore bands (of varying schools and genres), with each band doing three or four songs from their respective sets at the last day of the Eastpak Resistance Tour in Belgium. Nearly two and a half hours long, the most recurrent opinion this reviewer can express is that if hardcore is boring on record (and while many folks may not agree, I still think it’s a kind of music best experienced in a live setting), it’s even worse on video. While the sound quality is reasonably good, the film definitely suffers from a sense of exuberance – there’s probably five cameras rolling and the cuts are so fast and frequent, it runs the risk of becoming physically nauseating. And yet, we’re still talking about a video of a bunch of yahoos floundering around on a huge empty stage with, nine times out of ten, no audience participation. There’s only so much polish one can lay on a turd.

That said, here’s a run-down of all the bands performing, as well as various notes I took through the somewhat excruciating process of watching this thing.

Sick Of It All: Have never liked the band, but am willing to admit that the vocalist is a dead ringer for Michael Madsen. They sure as shit got the crowd riled up (and this looks like a fest with a few thousand people in attendance, with more in the balconies.)

7 Seconds: Kevin Seconds comes across a nice guy, and one of the only dudes in attendance not stricken with a debilitating case of ‘roid-rage or testosterone overdose. There seemed to be virtually no one watching them, despite the fact they’re classic as hell and did a pretty fun cover of Sham 69’s “If The Kids Are United.”

Slapshot: There’s a woman in a tank top and a hockey mask – presumably in homage to Slapshot – that keeps stagediving and doing singalongs throughout the show. The vocalist cuts his head open during “Watch Me Bleed” and does, indeed, bleed. To me, this band has always been the embodiment of dick-swinging machismo, and five songs comes across as five too many.

Unearth: We’re now in the growly-metal segment of the show. Long hair, palm-mutes and song titles like “Black Hearts Now Rain.” Singer keeps trying to get everyone to mosh.

Walls Of Jericho: Definitely the most high-energy band of the disc, even though their music is, again, growly metal. The frontwoman’s a fucking dynamo – relentlessly jumping around, with a voice like a ghoul to boot. However, it’s a little disconcerting to hear the sole female performer of the tour keep referring to everything as a “bitch” – the pit, the show itself, etc. Ah well, there’s me editorializing again.

The Bones: Reminiscent of bands like The Skulls and Social Distortion, they’re definitely the black sheep of this lineup. The pompadoured vocalist actually gets hit in the sunglasses with a piece of gum in the middle of “Spit It Out.” It was hilarious when the camera panned the audience, just to see hundreds of slack-jawed hardcore kids staring at the stage, silent and unmoving. Of course, they wind up being the funnest band of the bunch.

Judasville: The other odd-man-out of the bunch, with their garage-rock stuff that’s akin to The Black Furies or a poor man’s Lazy Cowgirls.

Heaven Shall Burn: Two songs of epic tech-metal, like a slightly more rocking Botch.

No Turning Back: The disc closes out with the lamest, more paint-by-numbers hardcore band ever, very much like a younger but just as clichéd and mid-tempo Slapshot.

At nearly two and a half hours long, there’s just no getting past the fact that films of this nature are longwinded and pretty goddamned uneventful. The bands are up here and the audience is down there and as a viewer, there’s just not a whole lot to hold one’s interest. I kept waiting for something to happen, but apart form the gum-spitting incident, nothing ever did.