New Live concert The Cure: Trilogy On HD

The Cure: Trilogy
A career spanning decades, a musical sound difficult to categorise and fronted by the messy-haired, lipstick-wearing Robert Smith, The Cure are a British rock phenomenon capable of pleasing the hard-rockers, goths and pop-lovers with their off-beat songs. In 2002 the band played three concerts – one in Brussels and two in Berlin – where they performed three albums in their entirety, Pornography, Disintegration and Bloodflowers, to a massive crowd. A DVD was released back in 2003 and now we have a Blu-ray featuring one of the Berlin concerts.

Three hours of music has been fitted onto this Blu-ray disc, with a total of 29 tracks featured in the concert and two separate encore songs bringing the grand total to 31, making this a comprehensive overview of The Cure's musical career. The three featured albums do this rather well too, with Pornography being a more aggressive, punky affair with gloomy lyrics and a brooding atmosphere, Disintegration being far more upbeat and poppy and finally Bloodflowers a strange mix of the two.

The Trilogy is a modern concert, therefore we have a flashy light show, lots of coloured filters and a smoke machine, and the direction is standard live footage fare too, with a cut every minute, a close-up here and a long shot there. Crowd shots and noise are kept to the minimum, with the footage concentrating on the stage, however since The Cure concentrate on the music rather than rushing about hither and thither, it's not especially interesting to watch.

If The Cure's music does it for you, then this Blu-ray is a worthy purchase, from the attractive digi-pack disc casing to the brilliance of the performance and music. What it isn't though is a movie or anywhere near as accessible to non-fans as The Who disc we reviewed last week, however for anyone keen to see a band play an entire three albums worth of music in one night (and make no mistake, this is a massive achievement) and still sound professional and polished, The Cure: Trilogy is ideal.