MERCILESS
Live Obsession
(Escapi Music)
approx. 100:00min

At the same show where DISMEMBER’s live DVD originates from (Stockholm – May 27, 2003), Sweden’s reunited premier Thrash lunatics also recorded their gig for another fine DVD release. This of course results in more top quality and turns MERCILESS’ crushing 12 track live-set into something highly enjoyable. I wasn’t too much impressed by the band’s self-titled "comeback" album, but in terms of their live qualities they are without a doubt still raging like hell and everyone into a furious old SLAYER / KREATOR mixture simply has to love these guys! On disc number two there’s some kind of documentary on the band, which not really ended up as informative as the one on the DISMEMBER DVD for the simple fact that MERCILESS obviously don’t take anything serious at all. All they seem to care about is booze and playing energetic and highly aggressive Metal as opposed to giving boring interviews. What a bunch of sick fellows, hahaha! Those "interview" sequences are interrupted by live footage from a show in Hultsfred, quality wise of course not as good as the Stockholm gig on the main disc, but still cool to watch nevertheless. But the most entertaining part for me definitely were their two promo videos for ‘Pure Hate’ and ‘Cold Eyes Of Grey’, which I had never seen before. Holy shit, especially ‘Pure Hate’ looks extremely silly nowaydays, with the band standing somewhere out in the hills, banging their heads and doing their playback "performance". If you remember a particular type of pictures that circulated of various Death & Thrash Metal bands in the late 80s / early 90s (let’s call it "aggressive-evil-posing"), you’ll already get a little idea of what to expect visually here… ‘Cold Eyes Of Grey’ is slightly better though and shows the band on stage (backed with the music from the album), which represents them best anyway. There’s another (real) live clip on here (don’t know if that was also an official promo video), which is mainly of interest because it documents Karlén’s "short hair period", hahaha. All in all not exactly as good as DISMEMBER’s DVD, yet another highly recommend release from Escapi with the usual extras (band biography, discography and image gallery). So, go out and fuckin’ buy it! More info you may find here: www.escapi.com

Frank Stöver

Frank Stöver

Related reviews / interviews:
MERCILESS - Merciless (Steven Willems )
MERCILESS - Interview (Steven Willems)

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