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D.R.I. > Live at CBGB's 1984 > Reviews > Ryan_M
D.R.I. - Live at CBGB's 1984

Hardcore defined. - 70%

Ryan_M, December 11th, 2008

On Saturday afternoon, April 7th, 1984; D.R.I. played a show at CBGB in New York City. After ripping through 40 songs in about 39 minutes, the band gets two copies of their performance, one on video and a tape from the mixing board. Fast forward 21 years, to 2005, and this particular set is finally released to the public. I picked this up maybe a month or so ago as of this writing, and I was kinda half expecting to be let down by it; be it from an unbearably poor sound recording, too much crowd noise, or too much between-song banter. Surprisingly, it turned out to contain almost none of the above problems; the mixing board recording sounds great, you can barely hear any crowd noise and Kurt Brecht keeps his talking between songs to a bare minimum; the band tearing into the next song with hardly any introductions.

This is undeniably killer for a live hardcore album but it does have one flaw: there is a small portion of footage missing from the mixing board tape, so it has been replaced with audio footage from the video. The problem is that the sound from the video footage isn't as good, so from track 33 (Draft Me) until track 39 (Blockhead), it's really muddy and muffled sounding. This is kind of a minor flaw, since its only a few minutes between tracks 33 to 39 so it doesn't ruin the album completely. You could skip over those tracks if you don't like the sound, but it hurts the continuity of the album.

If you're more into the earlier, less metal, pre-"Crossover" material, (which the band covers about 75% of in this album alone, including the entire 22 song e.p, the "Violent Pacification" e.p, and about half the songs from "Dealing With It"), this is a great CD for the most part, something it wouldn't hurt to check out if you're a fan.