Label: Ignite Music Format: DVD+CD
I‘m never really sure how to review live DVDs. This is partly because I don’t buy them often myself, except as records of gigs or tours I’ve seen in person. But also it’s because they don’t really fit with my music listening habits. Thankfully, although I wasn’t at this gig, I saw them around this time on the most recent reunion, so the DVD’s a bit of nostalgia for me for a gig that was itself a warm fuzzy flashback to the Guildford indie clubs of my youth. If you’re not familiar with Senser, they were a radical homegrown equivalent to Rage Against The Machine or Body Count, with leftie lyrics and a twin-vocalist arrangement and dance-savvy sound owing something to Pop Will Eat Itself.
Fast forward eleven years from the release of debut Stacked Up to this show in 2005, and several line-up changes have cycled Senser back to their original roster and restored their old agit-punk spirit. Rapper Heitham is still the angry little firebrand that appealed to the sixth-form rebel me back then, and the band belts them out with the ease of a bunch of mates who have had their differences, settled them and are now just doing what they love. The tracks that work the best these days are the funkier, rappier ones, with the out-and-out metal moments sounding a little hackneyed — or is that just me? Interestingly there’s no tracks at all from second album Asylum which had a significantly different line-up. Bad blood maybe.
There’s a few good tunes here that I didn’t recognise, like “Formula Milk” from 2004’s SCHEMAtic (which had totally passed me by) which sits very comfortably next to the classics like “States of Mind” and of course “Age of Panic” – which to be honest are the real highlights for me. Of the more guitar-driven moments, the standout track is the previously unreleased “Resistance Now”, inspired by France’s antagonism to the war in Iraq and sung partly in French. Interestingly, the DVD also comes with an audio CD of the same gig, a nice convenient touch. Would I recommend it as a purchase? Well, if you ever liked this kind of thing – and you’re the sort of person that buys live DVDs – hell yeah.
-Andrew Clegg-
