Living Colour's welcome entry into the excellent New Morning: The Paris Concert DVD series goes a long way in making up for the ridiculously short run time of their previous concert DVD - last year's, On Stage at World Café Live. Where that one whittled down a career-spanning, two-hour performance to a measly 58-minutes for the DVD, The Paris Concert gives you the entire 19-song, 107 minute set they hammered out at the New Morning club last year.
Although these American funk-rock masters have been together for about a quarter century now, they only have four studio albums to show for it, thanks in part to a six year layoff during the late 90's. Word has it, however, that a new album is in the works, and is tentatively scheduled for an early 2009 release. It will be their first since 2003's Collideøscope, an album that has divided more Living Colour fans than any other, and is easily my least favorite.
To this day, I can still throw on Living Colour's phenomenal debut album, Vivid, and get my rocks off without fail. I cannot say the same about their other three albums, which I felt were each progressively worse than the last. The band indulged in too much experimental nonsense, which got in the way of the good songs. These amazing musicians are not ones to get up on stage and play note-for-note renditions of all the hits either. A Living Colour show is always going to feature loads of improvisational detours that will prevent each song from ever sounding the same twice. This can be as equally frustrating as it is mesmerizing.
The Paris Concert was filmed in High Definition at the New Morning Club, Paris, France, on July 19th, 2007. The 19-song setlist provides a good career overview, showcasing at least a couple of songs from each of their four studio albums, as well as a few non-album covers. They also temporarily hand over the lead vocal duties to bassist Doug Wimbish on an excellent new song, "Either Way." I hope to see that one on the new album.
For some reason, the track listing on the DVD case, as well as the official press release, do not include two of the songs that were performed this night. "Wall" and "Times Up" were both missing from the list, and they bump up the official song tally to nineteen.
Article comments
1 - FreqDaddy
#5 of the DVD is actually Wall (from Stain)
2 - Paul Roy
It's like I listed it. The short instrumental "Nova", from the Collideøscope album is #5 in the set, and it leads into "Wall" which was #6. Who cares though, I was just glad to see "Wall" played, seeing that is was not listed on the case.