Latest music DVDs reviewed
BLUE MAN GROUP
The Complex Rock Tour Live Warner Music Vision/ Lava
****
For almost 14 years Blue Man Group have performed their downtown "performance art" show of home-made percussion, blue paint, bananas and very reflexive performance to sell-out houses. Originally intending to pastiche performance art but becoming a mainstream success instead, founders Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton, and Chris Wink have added music to their very successful BMG project with two albums, Audio (1999) and The Complex (2004), which combine layered electronica, driving polyrhythms and quirky songs into a marketing-savvy alt.rock mix - Dave Mathews appears on The Complex. Featuring three music videos and several enhanced audio tracks from The Complex, The Complex Rock Tour Live DVD is both a deliciously wry and entertaining live concert performance replete with knowing jabs at rock and pop iconography, and a deft new-branding of BMG Inc. www.blueman.com - Jocelyn Clarke
VARIOUS
Travel the World With Putumayo Putumayo
***
The label with the distinctive sleeves and innovative approach to flogging CDs, Putumayo is the family-friendly world music imprint. By concentrating on selling in as many non-music stores as possible and pitching these CDs as educational tools, Putumayo has brought world music to many who rarely venture beyond Top 40 rock and pop. The inaugural Travel the World DVD is perfectly tailored to this audience, a global travelogue of music videos that takes in the Congo, Brazil, Argentina, India, Nigeria and other destinations not yet on a Ryanair schedule. While there are quite a few musical clangers - a frightfully cheesy version of Toto's Africa by Tukuleur and a terrifying funky-Celtic rejigging of Bog a'Lochain by Mary Jane Lamond - there is enough here to encourage perceptive viewers to delve a little deeper. www. putumayo.com - Jim Carroll
