Eyehategod – Live

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MVD Visual
Produced by Gary Mader

“We’re looking for heroin and black girls.” So says EyeHateGod frontman Mike Williams before a stomping rendition of Kill Your Boss at a 2009 live show in Baltimore recorded for Live, the New Orleans sludge band’s second DVD and first since 2004. It’s exactly the kind of thing one should expect to fall from the mouth of one of the most notoriously drugged-out and politically incorrect singers in metal, and it introduces a performance of one of his band’s best songs. It’s a snapshot of the kind of depravity and pure southern heaviness Live offers.

The release is something of a mixed bag, but ultimately, it’s an essential look at one of the American underground’s most important bands in the live arena. Across two full sets (one in Cleveland, one in Baltimore), a partial one (Vienna), and three music videos, almost all of the essential EHG tracks are represented in some fashion. The video quality ranges from excellent to acceptable, but the DVD always feels honest, unlike so many carefully mixed and mastered metal DVDs that barely resemble the concert they were shot at anymore by the time they hit shelves. Every stray feedback squeal and exchange with hecklers is documented for posterity and completely unpolished. It’s really the only way to consume EyeHateGod’s music; they’ve always been a band about what lurks at the fringes of the song. Perhaps no single band can be more expressive with mere feedback, and that all comes out on Live.

The audio on the DVD, then, isn’t an issue at all. Where it loses a bit of entertainment value is in the camerawork, which consists of a few dark, grainy shots per venue, edited with seemingly no rhyme or reason. Live would work just as well as a live album, which isn’t something any DVD should aspire to. The music videos help – Sister Fucker is just the live clip from the DVD’s Cleveland show, but Anxiety Hangover and Age of Bootcamp are vaguely Lynchian compilations of disturbing black-and-white clips interspersed with live footage of the band. The focus of an EHG show arguably needn’t be visuals, though, so it’s fairly easy to forgive the lazy video direction.

The highlight of the DVD is easily the Baltimore performance of seven-minute mini-epic Crimes Against Skin from the Take As Needed For Pain album, a live rarity that deserves setlist staple status. Through its cycle of syrupy riffs and methed-out madman vocals, everything that makes EHG great is revealed. There may not be much variety on Live, but when it crushes, it CRUSHES. And really, isn’t that all we need from EyeHateGod?

“ depravity and pure southern heaviness ”

Tracklist:
Baltimore 2009 – Intro / Story of The Eye / Jackass In The Will of God / Take As Needed For Pain / Sister Fucker / Dixie Whiskey / White Nigger / Depress / Lack of Almost Everything / Masters of Legalized Confusion / Pigs / Methamphetamine
Cleveland 2010 – Blank / $30 Bag / Kill Your Boss / Left To Starve / Children of God / Blood Money / Crimes Against Skin / Dog’s Holy Life / Serving Time In The Middle of Nowhere / Outro
Vienna 2010 – Shoplift / Run It Into The Ground / Shinobi
Videos – Sister Fucker / Anxiety Hangover / The Age of Bootcamp

Written by Brad Sanders
More: 2011, DVDs, Live DVDs, Sludge, Eyehategod