Meat Loaf - Live with the Melbourne Symphony OrchestraI may have driven two or three too many nails into Meat Loaf’s coffin earlier this week.

Last night, I watched the over two hours’ of concert in the MEAT LOAF LIVE WITH THE MELBOURNE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA DVD. And he didn’t look or sound bad at all. I think there are a couple of reasons for this.

First, there’s something more powerful about seeing a live performance than in just hearing one. There are exceptions, such as Jessica Simpson. I get a nervous tic watching her jerk her head around. Usually, bringing together the visual cues with the audio ones help you appreciate the music more.

Second, the CD has shortened versions of all the songs. The DVD has extended versions of just about every song contained therein. Sometimes it’s just a little extra guitar solo or Meat Loaf extending the lyrics a bit, but it all adds up. When put into their proper context, it doesn’t sound like Meat Loaf is gasping for air and coming up short nearly so often. For sure, his vocal style has changed over the years a bit, and I’m sure some of that has to do with age. He doesn’t hold the long notes an obscene length of time, but it’s rare for a singer over 40 to do that, anyway. And Meat Loaf is passed 50. He still holds the notes for a goodly portion of time. His voice flutters a bit on most of those notes, too, and some of the screaming comes across more as just screaming than singing. Once you accept it, though, it sounds great.

I think the biggest contributing factor to any disappointment I may have had with the CD, though, is that Meat Loaf has to be getting bored with these songs. While he played three or four songs off the new album, the rest are songs he’s been singing since the late 70s or early 90s (in the case of BAT OUT OF HELL II). You can only sing the same damned 12 minute song so often before you start toying with it out of sheer boredom. And sometimes that toying sounds like a loss of control. It’s not. It’s just an artist trying to keep things fresh.

If there’s any doubt that he can still sing, pick up this concert and skip straight to “For Crying Out Loud.” Back when I would listen to the first HELL album on my ride to school, I’d often skip over “Paradise” and one or two others so that I could hear “Crying” before I had to turn the engine off. It’s possibly my favorite of all the songs Steinman and Meat Loaf have done. Even with the cheesy lyrics about faded Levis bursting apart, it’s a fabulous song. Gut-wrenching, even. And he nails it here. It’s the first time he’s done it live in front of an audience since March 1978, he says, but there’s no problem in this performance. In the commentary track, he points out one blown lyric, but I didn’t hear it.

Probably because he doesn’t sing it at every concert, he kept fairly tight to the album version of the song, which helps it out a lot, I think. The song is a real show-stopper, which isn’t great when you consider that there are three songs following it. ;-)

The concert as a whole is a wonderful piece of bombastic spectacle. There’s the orchestra, a boys choir, eight dancers dressed in skimpy motorcycle-inspired leather, flashing lights, rising chairs, costume changes… It’s a lot of fun.

The concert comes with Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS sound. I listened to the latter, which sounded great. Every speaker pounded throughout the concert. It couldn’t be helped. There’s just that much music to convey.

The video is anamorphic widescreen and looks good. I can’t give it the highest marks, because there are some times when skin tone gets a little soft, but you really need to be looking for that. The compression is pretty tight, too. This is a two hour concert squeezed onto this disc with four different soundtracks. The throughput on the video topped off at 6 Mbps. I’ve seen movies go up to 8 and 9 before.

There are also a couple of audio blips near the layer switch. The switch itself comes somewhere around 1:10 or 1:17, but there’s a spot in the middle of a song at 1:07 in which the sound drops out on my speakers for a second or two. It happens again for a second a minute or two after the layer switch. It’s temporarily annoying.

There is one large disappointment to the concert that I have to touch on, though. The highlight of the CD is “Heaven Can Wait.” That song does not appear on the DVD. I’d have loved to see that, even if at the cost of “Two Out Of Three.” You can’t get it all, can you? If you did, we’d also have seen “A Kiss Is A Terrible Thing To Waste” and “Is Nothing Sacred” and “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through” and — you get the point.

The second disc to this set is the behind the scenes material. I tried to get through the backstage video feature, but it’s a very very annoying attempt to be funny. The director attempts to get band members to talk to him for the DVD, but nobody wants to. It’s funny for the first minute, but not much past that. At least we get to see more of C.C. in it, though, and that’s hardly a bad thing. (Aside from the bassist/musical director, the drummer, and Patti Russo, Loaf has a revolving door for backup singers and guitarists and pianists.)

So, to sum up: Meat Loaf ain’t dead yet. The concert DVD is awesome. I enjoyed rattling the walls with it. Pick it up if you like this stuff at all.