Dark Romanticism

This package was put together by Hammerheart/Karmageddon with a very sneaky intent. It contains a live DVD performance of Primordial at the Summer Breeze festival on the tour behind Storm Before Calm. Making it an obvious choice for a Primordial fan who, like myself, was really curious to see what the band was like live, and the words "includes bonus DVD" were just too alluring to resist.

As far as the audio CD goes, it's Dark Romanticism, Primordial's acclaimed demo, couple with a few live tracks that were recorded in the bands infancy using some very crappy equipment. The tracks are definitely interesting, but the quality makes it hard to really give it a worthwhile listen. Though it's pretty cool to hear Primordial covering Bathory and Darkthrone, even if you can barely hear the songs. The other live track is not available on any other CD, and is fairly akin to the Imrama material. All in all a good listen, as the Dark Romanticism demo is pretty awesome as far as I am concerned.

Now we come to the DVD. Well, I must say that the menu for this DVD is one of the shittiest menus I've ever encountered in my long tenure as a follower of all things metal. I mean, I've made better fucking menus using my computer's stock DVD burning program, consisting of a static background with text. This menu looks like absolutely not ONE ounce of effort was put into making it respectable. Not a fucking ounce. .... Seriously, it's pathetic. it's just a blue screen, with a freeze frame of the first shot of the video, on some stupid little film reel in the background.

Well, perhaps, one might think that even though the menu is shit, the quality of the actual show might be decent? Well, at first you might think so. I mean, the audio is clearly soundboard quality, but the band is really into it, and you can watch Nemtheanga's overblown theatrics, and the solid foundation that is the band, and be thoroughly impressed and entertained. Though it looks like they got the shaft as far as when and where they played in the festival. There are a few shots of the crowd, and there really aren't too many people there. And most are doing the standard German head nod. So it's hard to feel like they were that excited. It's also in broad daylight, which takes away a degree of the mystique.

Now as I was watching this, I started to realize that the video and the audio were gradually losing synchronization with one another. It started out as a minor problem, as some DVD's suffer from this. Kreator's Live Kreation is one of these, and it's still pretty decent. However, towards the end of the show, which is around 50 minutes long, the audio and video are completely out of synch. This is just fucking inexcusable! I don't want to watch Nemtheanga saying some shit and singing 2 seconds after I fucking heard it!!

Anyway, the setlist is good, including some awesome songs that you can see in the album info page. So that I can't really complain about. Luckily I only paid about 15 bucks for this package. However DO NOT buy this simply because you've already downloaded/bought Dark Romanticism and are curious about the live DVD. It's shit. But then it was released by Hammerheart/Karmageddon. I mean this is the same label that released Chuck Schuldiner's final Control Denied demos in a horribly incomplete and unfinished fashion, thus preventing the band from finishing the album, as was one of Chucks' last requests. Hmmmm, classy.

The audio CD kept this review from plummeting into the shitter, as it does for the whole compilation. Nice job Hammerheart.