Pink Floyd Perfection

Let me start out by telling you a bit about myself, and my love of Pink Floyd music. I've been a fan for many years, owning many albums, but having only seen one concert of any sort of Pink Floyd's, actually just Roger Waters live in Berlin. But the point there is that I hadn't ever seen Pink Floyd live at all. And being the year it is now...it is very unlikely I will ever see them live in person. Then a family member got this video (on DVD) for me. Now before I go into my opinions of what I thought of it, I'm going to give you some details:

Songs:
Echoes pt 1
Careful With That Axe Eugene
A Saucerful of Secrets
Us and Them (studio demo)
One of These Days
Mademoiselle Nobs
Brain Damage (studio demo)
Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun
Echoes pt 2

In addition to this there is a lot of additional band interviews and such, interjected between the songs, taken from Dark Side of the Moon recording sessions.

As you might be able to tell from the title, this concert is performed in Pompeii, Italy.

This DVD shows what you would expect from Pink Floyd: great music, great performance, and abstract landscape/artwork. A few of these songs have footage of Pompeii; the volcanoes, the shores, and the Roman sculpture and mosaics. Some computer animated stuff is also thrown in there, of planets in space, valleys on Mars, and of the volcanic eruption that leveled Pompeii. These scenes are artfully integrated with the music.

Most of the songs are filmed, showing Gilmour and Waters' excellent guitar work, Mason's drumming, and Wright's beautiful piano/keyboard playing. They all get excellent coverage; unlike some concert videos it isn't biased. But on this point there is one exception, which was the only weak point to this DVD, was "One of These Days." This is a very excellent song, very strong in every aspect (except lyrically; it's an instrumental). But throughout the entire song Mason is the only one shown! At first I found this very outrageous, being a very bass oriented piece. Later, I found out that the reason Mason is the only one shown is because of damage to footage of all the other members...so I guess we're out of luck.

Personally, my favorite musical parts are "Echoes" and "A Saucerful of Secrets." "Echoes" is really just a great display of all of their talents. It shows off all of their strong points, working together to make a musical masterpiece. Though I don't care much for the very weird first half of "A Saucerful of Secrets," it was fun to see how they made all of those weird sounds, especially watching Roger, beating the hell out of the symbols and then later a large gong. It really looked like they were having a blast.

I think the non-musical parts are almost as good as the musical ones, because they really show what unique people are in Pink Floyd. It sort of gives you an insight as to what makes them tick, and how they view certain things. It can also be quite humorous at times.