Stryper – Greatest Hits: Live In Puerto Rico (Music Video Distributors)
Picture: C+ Sound: B- Extras: C+ Concert: C
Stryper’s
“Greatest Hits: Live in Puerto Rico”,
filmed on March 6, 2004, features the band’s original Eighties line-up: Michael
Sweet (lead vocals guitar), his brother Robert Sweet (drums), Ox Fox (lead
guitar), Tim Gaines (bass) – with the addition of Brent Jeffers (keyboards) –
reunited for a concert that covers most of the group’s classic material. The show is shot by director Jack Edward
Sawyers in fairly straightforward, but competent, concert footage style, that
leaves the viewer feeling like they had the best seat in the house.
Personally,
I have never been a big fan of Stryper (or Christian Rock in general to be
fair) because I feel the band combines the worst of Eighties metal clichés with
unimaginative music and lyrics that amount to the type of “Jesus Saves”
sloganisms that can be heard any Sunday at just about every Mega church in the
United States. However, the pumped up,
enthusiastic crowd of Puerto Rican metal fans at this concert proves that my
opinion is far from universal. Plus, the
millions of fans, who have Stryper’s multi-platinum records in their
collections, will be happy to hear that Stryper of 2004 is still in good form
and puts on a satisfying show. In this
concert Ox, Tim and Robert demonstrate they still command pro-musician quality
chops and perhaps best of all for the long time Stryper fans, Michael Sweet still
has the pipes that allowed him to belt out Eighties power ballads with the best
of them.
The
concert picks up steam as it goes and hits its highpoint toward the end with
good versions of “Soldiers Under Command”
and “To Hell with the Devil”. The band follows this with their biggest
radio hit “Honestly”, which I
honestly think they could have played out longer and turned into a rousing
sing-along. Instead the band chooses to
end the show with the anti-climactic and somewhat bizarre (considering the
concert is in March) Christmas classic “Winter
Wonderland”. The full set list from
the main program is as follows:
Sing Along Song
Makes Me Want To Sing
Calling On You
Free
More Than A Man
Caught In The Middle
We Won’t Be Lonely
Reach Out
Loud And Clear
The Way
Soldiers Under Command
To Hell With The Devil
Honestly
Winter Wonderland
Once you
have finished the main concert if you are in the mood to see Stryper younger,
skinnier, and with more hair and eyeliner, then you can turn to the bonus
features, which are comprised of five outtakes from a 1989 Tokyo concert. The added songs feature the band’s musicians
doing fairy forgettable instrument solos, but the bonus footage is still a nice
touch, giving the fan a “then and now” view of the band and reminding us of
what heavy metal and glam looked like in the Eighties. The songs featured in the bonus footage are
as follows:
Robert’s Drum Solo
Keep The Fire Burning
Always There For You
Rockin’ The World
Tim And Oz’s Solo’s
The
photography of the concert and the transfer of the print to DVD do not rival
that of high-dollar productions, like say U2’s Rattle and Hum (reviewed in HD-DVD and Blu-ray elsewhere on this
site), but it is adequate and the band’s fans will be happy with the view of
the concert they receive. For those of
you with top-notch home theaters, while this may not be the film you grab to
show off your high definition TV, the soundtrack will let you impress your
friends with the quality of your speakers.
The sound is mixed well and comes in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround
sound. The only audio options you
receive from the menu however are surround or stereo.
In the
end, while this film didn’t save my soul or really even get me rocking out –
I’m sure Stryper fans will be thrilled with the opportunity to add this concert
to their collection and it will surely take them back to the glory days of
hair, metal and yellow and black bibles being thrown out into packed concert
halls.
- Michael DiTullio
