The Blue Van - Man Up

I was thrown a bit when I first popped the album in for a listen. When I unabashedly raved about their debut back in 2005, I wrote, “Throughout The Art of Rolling, Søren V. Christensen plays the Hammond Organ, Wurlitzer, Vox Organ and Mellotron. He is the main ingredient that makes this band stand out from the pack and its sound hearken back to the old days.” However, when listening to “Be Home Soon” the first track on the band’s third album Man Up, I couldn’t hear any magnificent keyboards. I wouldn’t have to wait for long before finding them, but they don’t have the same prominence as before and don’t stay around for long.

No surprise that a traveling band would write a song like “Be Home Soon,” but it works for anyone apart from a loved one. The guitars and drums build to a rocking crescendo that recalls The Kinks and The Who. The band lays down a good groove on the title track while the arrangements alternate between full band to isolated electronic drum pad loop. The organ adds nice fills in the mix.

A couple of upbeat rockers follow that cancel each other out in terms of maturity. The narrator of “Silly Boy” wants the young men to grow up. Then one of those silly boys could well be singing “There Goes My Love” who he wants oral sex from in the matter-of-fact lyrics that finds the band moving up a decade in influence as they ape the straightforwardness of ‘70s bands like KISS and AC/DC, sounding more like their peers the band Jet. The music on the latter resembles the great reckless abandon of young lust.

“Lay Me Down And Die” opens slow and soft, as Steffen Westmark sings over a lone guitar, but there’s no ballad here as the pace and arrangement picks up the intensity like a blues-infused classic rock song. The organ makes a return in “The Socialite” and gets featured on the bridge, sounding more like the band’s earlier work.

It’s curious for a band with a throwback sound to have a song named “I'm A Man” because it invites more comparisons than usual, including artists the likes of Bo Diddley and Spencer Davis Group. Here the band expands their sound even further with Mads “Pølle” Poulsen on sax and Shaka Loveless rapping. The sax works well, but the rapping doesn’t add anything.

The arrangements on Man Up find the band harder to distinguish from other retro-sounding bands currently on the scene. I wouldn’t sing the same high praise their debut warranted, but they still deliver an enjoyable 44 minutes of music.

With the collapse of TVT Records, the band has no U.S. distributor. The album can currently be downloaded from iTunes and a vinyl version is reportedly due anytime.

The Who - Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970 (Blu-ray)

The Blu-ray of Live...1970 marks its fifth entry into the home video market after a previous VHS release and three DVD releases, the last of which was the 2006 DVD reviewed here.

Capturing The Who at the height of its power, Academy Award-winning documentarian Murray Lerner and his team recorded the band at 2am on August 30th, 1970 to an enthusiastic crowd estimated at 600,000. Although not presented in its proper order, the 85-minute set reveals why the band is held in such high regard among rock aficionados and why all four excelled at their respective roles. Although the least flamboyant of the quartet, I would have preferred more coverage of bassist John Entwistle’s hands as he worked his magic.

The audio is massive and demonstrates both the power of The Who and Blu-ray to drive the parents and the neighbors crazy. Right from the start, the viewer is engulfed in the sound as the audience fills the surround speakers. Entwistle and drummer Keith Moon give the subwoofer an impressive workout, which may leave it a smoldering wreck. The upgrade to DTS HD Master Audio and even the LPCM Stereo are more impressive than the 2006 release, giving the band a fuller sound and separating them, creating a sense of their placement on stage with Entwistle dominating the left, guitarist Pete Townshend dominating the right, and Moon and singer Roger Daltrey dominating the center. The Dolby Digital 5.1 has been mixed quite a bit lower than the rest.

Not much has been done to augment the picture in high definition. Presented in 1080i Widescreen 16x9 1.78.1, the image shows a lot of grain. It looks to be caused by some combination of the limits of the film cameras and film stock trying to record the performance that was lit for a rock concert as opposed to a movie. There are also rare instances of dirt. Compared to the 2006 DVD played on a Blu-ray player, the video quality is similar. However during “Heaven and Hell,” when band members were shot from the side with the dark night sky as the background causing Daltry and Entwistle to be lost in the shadows, the image was manipulated with brightness to bring them out. This caused some blacks to get a unnatural bluish tint.

The Supplemental material is exactly the same as the 2006 DVD release. While I understand businesses wanting to maximize their profits, I don’t understand why the Bonus Tracks of “Substitute” or “Naked Eye” weren’t inserted back into their rightful place within the set.

As someone who usually doesn’t care for double-dips, the enhanced audio makes the upgrade worth it.