Arriving all together like a Wikileaks information dump, these two double-DVD packages document four Babymetal live shows from 2014, almost six hours of material shot in London and Tokyo.
Filmed four months apart, the two British shows track the Japanese band’s exploding profile from their relatively stripped-down London debut at the Forum to a much bigger and slicker production at Brixton Academy, complete with films outlining their demented Matrix-style sci-fi back story and extended solo spots for their crack band of ghost-faced, guitar-shredding Shaolin monks.
But for serious fans, the two Tokyo shows are unbeatable in scale and spectacle. Staged in the round at the fabled Budokan arena, capacity 20,000, both are exhilarating Metallica-sized blockbusters featuring lasers, coffin-shaped spaceships, costume changes, flame cannons, revolving stages and lashings of Satanic metal imagery.
Beelzebub has a devil put aside for Babymetal, whose novelty pop-thrash surface clearly conceals richer, darker, stranger depths. Totally Babymental. Resistance is futile.
