Gigantour

event website

publisher

impulse buy

SPV
Produced by Dave Mustaine

Megadeth front-man Dave Mustaine conceived the Gigantour as a rival touring festival for Ozzy Osbourne‘s Ozzfest, declaring the 10-year-old circus to not be providing enough choice. This is a fairly accurate assessment, as the Ozzfest for many years has been entirely populated by young, screaming bands, with just Ozzy and one or two more traditional headliners at the top of the bill. Bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Rob Zombie, Slayer and Velvet Revolver have all featured highly on the bill in recent years.

And now, just as Ozzfest used to do, Dave has brought out a compilation album recorded live on the tour. It took Ozzfest ten years to bring out a DVD, but Dave has set a precedent and brought one out in the first year. Each band gets two songs (Megadeth get three) over two CDs and two DVDs (Anthrax are not on the DVD).

The album is a much better product that the DVD, purely because between each band’s section on the DVD there’s backstage footage and comments from Dave, all of which serve only to ruin the flow of the live footage (not that a compilation of bands achieves much of a flow anyway). It runs more like a Gigantour documentary than a live DVD, and there’s only so many times something like that remains entertaining. The second DVD is all backstage, interview and additional footage, the only truly good bit of which being the complete one-off performance of Pantera‘s Cemetary Gates by Dream Theater on the Dallas stop of the tour. Throughout the song different guests from the other bands on the tour joined DT for a verse or, in Mustaine’s case, a guitar solo.

The album is, obviously, just the live songs. While it is a more enjoyable experience, it still feels disjointed, switching from one band to another every couple of songs. Releasing the complete set by each band would have been a much better idea. This would have slightly increased production costs of the product, but would undoubtedly also have increased sales. For example, many, many more Megadeth fans would have bought a complete recording of Megadeth than are going to buy this album, on which they only get three songs.

Personally, I’m a fan of Dream Theater, Nevermore, Symphony X and Megadeth, so there’re quite a lot of songs here that I like, but all four bands are very different, and I wouldn’t normally listen to these four together.

An even better solution would have been to embrace the lossless audio download stores bands like Metallica, Gov’t Mule, Pearl Jam and the Bonnaroo Festival all use to make complete sets by each band available for purchase.

Compilations have a very limited appeal, and while the tracks here are exclusive live versions, it is still unlikely to shift many copies. The quality of the recording is excellent throughout, and this makes the idea of complete sets from each band even more appealing. I would certainly invest in the complete sets from the four bands I particularly like, and might even spring for Anthrax as well.

Expect a similar release next year, with the same mixed bag of bands (the excellent, yet completely different Opeth, Overkill and Megadeth again alongside The Smashup, Lamb of God and Arch Enemy).

“ disjointed ”

Tracklist:
CD 1 Dream Theater Panic Attack / Dream Theater Glass Prison / Anthrax Caught In A Mosh / Anthrax I Am The Law / Life of Agony Day He Died / Life of Agony Love To Let You Down / Dry Kill Logic Lost / Dry Kill Logic Paper Tiger / Bobaflex Better Than Me / Bobaflex Medicine
CD 2 Megadeth She Wolf / Megadeth A Tout Le Monde / Megadeth Kick The Chair / Fear Factory Transgression / Fear Factory Archtype / Nevermore Born / Nevermore Enemies of Reality / Symphony X Inferno (Unleash The Fire) / Symphony X Of Sins And Shadows

Written by Andy Lye
More: Live Albums, Live DVDs, Progressive, Thrash Metal, Anthrax, Dream Theater, Megadeth, Symphony X