pastelflower, that's because of the production. I was astonished and disappointed to find how those shows came across on the video because the energy and excitement seemed to be gone. The apparent lack of movement is a result of not having enough cameras at the front tracking the individual members. The guys were moving, and Kamijo in particular was all over the place teasing the audience, but you can't really see that on whole-stage footage shot from the back of the venue.
I have a particular beef with the sound quality because, while it's hard to do good video on a low budget, it would have been so easy and inexpensive to do the audio better that there's just no excuse. I have a bootleg audio recording of the first night -- one of the people I went with wanted to stand in the back anyway, so I wired him up with an ordinary consumer-level minidisc recorder, a disc on 2x speed, and a $20 microphone, and he stood right in front of the sound booth -- and this recording of mine sounds BETTER than the audio on the Last Lie video. I don't see why official staff who had the ability to hook recorders up to the sound booth's line-out couldn't have done a better job than we did.
It's too bad Go didn't leave his jrocknyc archives up, because he was at the 2nd night (the last one) and I think his review gave an objective view of how it really was, from the point of view of a non-fan. He didn't care about New Sodmy or Lareine, he just went that night because I had an extra ticket and he had nothing else to do. He'd come to one concert a few weeks before that he'd thought was pretty dull (and he was right, they didn't play their best that night) and was skeptical about coming to the last one... But he was impressed by the last live -- how much energy there was, and how much all the members were moving around and interacting with the audience -- and he wrote a really positive review about that show. I loved New Sodmy so much I'm probably inclined to be biased, but there was no reason for Go to suddenly change his opinion of them from "dull" to "rockin'!" unless they really were rockin' that night.
yay! !
