Review of Travis: More Than Us Live In Glasgow

Introduction

Glaswegian rock band Travis have been around since the early nineties, and released their first album "Good Feeling" in 1997, but it was the 1999 album "The Man Who" that turned them into huge stars, with it`s memorable songs "Turn", "Driftwood" and "Why Does It Always Rain On Me". The success of the album was followed earlier this year with "The Invisible Band" containing songs like "Sing", "Side" and "Pipe Dreams".

Travis - More Than Us Live In Glasgow features songs from all three albums, performed at Glasgow`s "Gig on the Green" festival in August this year.

Video

The video is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen and is of reasonably good quality throughout - certainly on par with the other concert videos that I`ve seen recently. As you would expect from a live music DVD, the visuals consist of footage of the band on stage, with various camera angles and shots of the crowd. As with most live DVDs, there is not much in the way of excitement in the visuals, but they are well presented

Audio

The soundtrack comes in a choice of Dolby Digital 5.1 and Dolby Digital 2.0. For live performances like this one, I prefer Dolby Digital 5.1 and on this disc, the multi-channel mix is slightly softer and more balanced that the stereo soundtrack, and as a result sounds considerably better for it. Good use is made of the soundfield for both the music and crowd noise.

Features

Music discs used to come out bare, but luckily documentaries are becoming more and more common. This disc features a documentary following the band over the weekend of 24th-26th August 2001 - firstly at the Reading & Leeds festival, then onto Glasgow. It is a fly-on-the-wall style documentary, features input from all band members and is quite entertaining. You can either watch the documentary in one go, or in segments that fit in between some of the songs. I watched it in one go instead.

Other extras consist of a discography and multiple camera angles.

Conclusion

Overall this is a good DVD, which features a good concert from an excellent band with a varied range of songs that should appeal to a wide audience. The video and sound quality are both good and the documentary is interesting.

However, there is one grumble…when selecting to watch the concert minus the documentary segments (i.e. like me you would rather watch the documentary separately in one go at the end) you can`t move forward through the tracks - so either have to watch all of the concert including any song`s you`re not so keen on, or watch with the documentary segments in place and skip them. Bah!