The Best Of Cracker –
Get On With It (DVD-Video + CD)
DVD: Picture: C+
Sound: C+ Extras: D Compilation: B-
CD: Sound: B Music: B
Cracker is an interesting band at an interesting time in
American Music. They are a better real
Rock band than most Rock bands around, especially those “Emo Rock” groups that
seem outright castrated by comparison, and also represent more where Country
should be now if it were not sold out to rollback politics, was so
corporatized, plastic and frankly ethnically cleaned. Get On With It is the title of two different sets of the
band’s work to date; including a CD hits set and a DVD-Video with their few
Music Videos and a bunch of live performances.
The live performances are not bad, though sometimes
lacking the edge of their famous studio hit counterparts, coming from a 12/4/93
concert at Denver, Colorado’s Ogden Theater.
Get Off This a year later from MTV 120 Minutes (7/18/94)
is sandwiched between their clips for Teen Angst (What The World Needs Now)
from 1992, Low from 1993, Euro-Trash Girl from 1994 and I Hate
My Generation from 1996. Carlos
Grasso directed the first three Videos and has also worked with Deep Blue
Something, Timbuk 3, Joe Satriani, Soul Asylum and L7. For a change of pace, Samuel Bayer directed I
Hate My Generation, but with no extras and plenty of room left on this
disc, Bayer’s clip for the band’s song Nothing To Believe In is absent
from the DVD and not on the CD either.
Grasso’s clip for Get Off This and a clip for Happy Birthday
To Me is also missing.
The CD has all the other hits and eleven studio cuts on
the DVD, though once again there was extra room and having the shorter edit cut
of Euro-Trash Girl seems like another bad move. If all these strange omissions are about is
to keep their regular, previous catalog releases desirable to fans, then that
is the only reason to do them.
Otherwise, it gives the idea of “best” a strange connotation.
Then there is the performance of each version of the
release. The DVD has a 1.33 X 1 picture
ratio throughout, which is outright NTSC analog video in the concert segments
and a mix of color, monotone and outright black and white in the four
Videos. They look the best of all,
though slight fringing in the color Teen Angst (What The World Needs Now)
clips is noticed. The sound is PCM 2.0
16bit/48kHz Stereo throughout the disc, though the menus are Dolby Digital for
whatever reason. The CD may be in the
usual PCM 2.0 16bit/44.1kHz Stereo, but upon playback, my HDCD decoder kicked
in and the sound was even better than expected. Too bad this was not a multi-channel DVD-Audio or SACD, but this
outperforms the DVD-Video version with ease.
Maybe Virgin will do a double set, but Cracker has yet to peak and with
their unique brand of talent and political incorrectness, we need to hear more
from David Lowery, Johnny Hickman and company do not see this as the end of
their journey.
- Nicholas Sheffo
