Bonafide
Messin' in Wales - Live at Hard Rock Hell 2012

Bonafide has been to a festival, and they have recorded the whole thing on camera and on microphone. This, they think is good enough to unleash upon the world. I am of course not so sure about that as Bonafide has always failed to thrill me, but of course I was hoping for this DVD to shed some of their silly clichés and surprise me. Was it ill-fated hope for something more interesting? Well, musically it is the same old, same old. I guess you could say very old and very tried and tested. Most people are probably bored with that stuff already, my father was even a kid when this kind of music was cool and rebellious and I am not exactly young any more. It isn’t cool or rebellious anymore but nostalgics still praise these guys which is fine but to be honest they are much worse than the originals and these are not very good to begin with. Copying, stealing, or whatever you like to call it is not my idea of what is good, there has to be some of the band’s own soul in the music and to me nothing of the sort has ever been present in the music of Bonafide. The music isn’t even good.

We have never made any secret of how much we dislike Bonafide and their thing on this webzine but on the other hand Bonafide isn’t making opinions like that difficult. After all, they are making rock clichés all the time and they are just much too serious about themselves to be entertaining about it. I am not impressed by what they have done before and frankly I am probably even less impressed by this DVD, it is completely dreary and dull. Dusty old songs performed in a dusty old way can be one way to look at it but that would be making it easy.

The band is completely static, like they were glued to the floor. The audience seems lethargic and completely silent. This karma devoid band even brings in some girls to spice up their stage show in a few of the songs, they play with fire and stuff. This should spice up the show and normally it probably would, but they are dreary looking metal girls with an abundance of tattoos and looks quite gloomy. Not very sexy at all. Sure one or two of the girls are quite attractive but overall their presence feels more forced than anything else, like a silly and pointless rock cliché. Another thing bothers me as well while I am at the performance, why the hell does the singer have to talk so fucking much? He doesn’t do it well and the audience respond poorly to what he does even though he says they are filming for a DVD time and time again.

So the performance is boring, which is of course sad but what about filming? Well the film and editing is also quite dull, but I guess it is hard to make a static band interesting even with fancy cutting and filming. And the bonus material was quite boring as well, the best thing about this album is the music which is a funny contradiction as music has never been a strong point of this band, neither has humour. I guess that this leads us to conclude that this a DVD for those who already are into this band, the rest of us better steer clear as it offers nothing of consequence. The sound is really good though, but unfortunately the songs aren’t.

HHHHHHH