Review: Rob Zombie – Zombie Live
Media hound Rob Zombie’s latest musical release, after the successful re-launch and re-imagining of the Halloween franchise this past August, is a live collection of songs recorded in 2006 as part of the Educated Horses tour. The disc, popping in at over an hour, and containing 18 songs, is a great mix of big radio hits and somewhat lower key songs dug deep from within the artist’s long career, even harking back to the days of White Zombie.
The massive production values of the live shows certainly come out to play here as the overall sound of the disc is loud, amplified, and certainly live with the banging drums and screeching guitars sometimes drowning out Zombie’s vocals. The crowd is ever present throughout, but, in opposition to most live albums around, either Zombie’s interaction with them is cut for the sake of time, or each concert is just one song after another until its all done kind of affair. The former could be understood, while the latter would certainly be disappointing. For those who have never made it to a Zombie show, they may feel as though the very fan-oriented singer/songwriter/director lacks that extra bit of stage presence.
As mentioned before, track selection ranges from the big hits like “Dragula,”; “Living Dead Girl,”; and “More Human than Human“; to deeper cuts like “House of 1000 Corpses“; and “Sawdust in the Blood.”; Zombie took a bit of flack for the entire Educated Horses album do to its decidedly different tone in comparison to the more macabre earlier works by the artists, so it’s nice to see him so vehemently include even deeper tracks from that disc.
The biggest disappointment of all is the once promised live DVD and highly anticipated art book were not released in tandem with the album, as once suspected, and will be streeting early 2008. Fans may take this as a way to grab even more money from them by selling the two sets separately, albeit a bundle pack containing all three items is all but a given next spring.
Overall, Zombie Live is a standard live album with great production values, no real surprises or new material, and just a general, middle-of-the-road type release to let Zombie’s legion of fans know that he’s still making music, touring, and coming to get you.
