Alanis Morissette - Feast on Scraps

Alanis Morissette may never again reach the dizzying heights of sheer commercial mega-success that she attained with the album that launched her “second career�, Jagged Little Pill. And the last person to care about that would likely by Alanis herself. Two albums and eight years later, the woman who turned confessional songwriting into a global movement has taken greater control of her own destiny, self-producing last year’s Under Rug Swept album and gaining critical plaudits in the process. Naturally a world tour followed - and just as naturally, the live DVD arrives to wrap the whole process up. But this live disc isn’t your garden-variety 70-minute run through the live set quickly stuck onto a DVD and shoved into the shops; rather, it’s an attempt to chronicle the background activity of the tour, hopefully capturing the Morissette spirit and state of mind as it goes. Appropriately, this blending of professionally-shot concert footage and shamelessly low-fi home video is titled, along with its companion audio compilation of outtakes, Feast On Scraps.

Morissette has a long-standing reputation as a no-holds-barred live performer, and this tour’s no exception; working with a band that is the epitome of commitment and skill, she throws everything into the show and as a result sends many songs that were straightforward on record into white-hot orbit on the live stage. The 18 songs included here (21 if you count studio track That Particular Time and an (inexplicable) extra two live versions of B-side track Purgatorying) cover the most popular bits of the last three albums - and surprisingly, given the amount of touring this woman has done, even the Jagged Little Pill material sounds fresh. Best in show, though, is the opening song - a wickedly fierce attack on the Zeppelin-esque Baba from 1998’s Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie album which actually betters the already-thrilling studio original.

The down-side for those enjoying the live songs is the choppy nature of the editing of some of them; Morissette, credited with direction of the finished DVD program (the live sequences themselves were directed by Pierre Lamoureux), has opted for a grungy, cut-and-paste approach where the pristine vision and audio of a live track can suddenly jump to raw footage from a consumer camcorder, ear-shatteringly distorted audio and all. It fortunately doesn’t happen too often, but when it does it’s intensely irritating.

The live songs (usually presented one at a time, sometimes in pairs) are interspersed with camcorder footage from the tour, shot everywhere from backstage to press conferences to the back seat of a car. It’s terrific stuff - anyone who’s ever thought Morissette was an over-serious person based on her recorded work will be pleasantly surprised by how, well, fun she can be, mercilessly lampooning herself for the amusement of her band and crew. It’s great stuff, and never too serious - though there are the occasional moments of thoughtfulness and introspection.

It’s a great package overall, and at a whopping 140 minutes running time there’s enough music and candid documentary footage to satisfy any fan, while still holding the interest of the uninitiated. Highly recommended.

The anamorphic video here is presented in two visible aspect ratios. The documentary footage, by the look of it (and all the errors and glitches!) shot on consumer DV cameras, is at 1.33:1 and is pillarboxed in the centre of the frame. The concert footage, on the other hand, was shot anamorphically and is presented that way, though mysteriously matted to a 1.88:1 aspect ratio (presumably for aesthetic reasons). As you would expect with material of such widely carrying sources, the documentary footage fluctuates in quality and can, at times, look so grungy it’ll break the hearts of all you projector owners. This is, of course, the whole idea!

The concert footage is of decent enough quality, though it certainly isn’t state of the art; shot in Rotterdam, Holland, it was presumably originated on PAL cameras, and looks to have been converted to NTSC for editing and then, for this PAL disc, back the other way again. That would certainly explain the minor but noticeable lack of definition, slightly soft edges and less-than-robust colour saturation. However, there are no major visual problems - if you’re looking for a textbook demonstration of digital video, you’re looking at the wrong disc, but we’re betting that those who aren’t specifically looking for problems will see nothing wrong with the visuals at all - and next to the camcorder material, the concert looks positively radiant anyway…!

There are no video encoding problems anywhere here, no doubt thanks to the use of almost the entire capacity of a dual-layered disc for the 140-minute feature.

Two audio tracks are provided - a 16/48 Linear PCM stereo track and a Dolby Digital 5.1 version. Both are very good, but it’s the PCM track that wins here; the Dolby 5.1 mix is underwhelming, making scant use of the centre channel and surrounds (the latter largely only come to life for audience noise), delivering decent bass kick through the LFE channel but missing a high frequency punch that the PCM track offers throughout. It’s pleasing to see Warner’s US releases still regularly supplied with PCM audio - it’d be even nicer to see 20 or 24 bit used - and the lossless nature of the format means that even with only two channels, this track outdoes its surround competitor. Not surprisingly, it’s the default audio choice.

The concert sound mix is excellent, but beware the “found sound� audio excerpts we mentioned earlier. On several occasions these involve seriously harshly clipped recordings from camcorder microphones that will test even the staunchest Adrian Sherwood fan.

Aside from a small collection of fan-shot concert photos and a Macromedia Director-based DVD-ROM “secret weblink� on the DVD, there’s nothing else in terms of extra features on the shiny gold platter - just the show, at a nice high bitrate, along with very well-done animated menus (and admirably, the show plays on inserting the disc without the user having to navigate menus first).

But don’t get too upset about that. Just look in that DVD case again. There’s another disc there - a standard audio CD, containing eight unused songs from the sessions for Under Rug Swept, along with an acoustic version of Hands Clean. And these aren’t your average crap outtake B-sides - though some of the songs here have indeed been released as B-sides outside of the US. There are a few songs here that better anything on the album they didn’t make it to, including the ominous Fear of Bliss and the tightly energetic Sister Blister. All eight “new� songs are terrific, and if you didn’t get enough of Purgatorying during its three live versions on the DVD, its studio incarnation can be found here.

Also on the audio CD, in a separate CD-ROM session, are three Quicktime clips of Alanis recording three of the tracks, along with the same “secret weblink� found on the DVD. The idea of the latter is that you click on a link in the small application you run from the CD, and you get taken to a secret web site where you can register for “exclusive� access. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get this to work at first - clicking on the link from our (retail) disc brought up a page that bluntly stated “Hacker Baaaaaaaaaad...�! Ironic, don’t you think? (Sorry!) At any rate, disabling the obligatory firewall service on the computer finally stopped the hacker accusation and let us register; inside the site is plenty of bonus video footage (Windows Media and RealVideo) and photos.

And incidentally, the back cover of this disc breaks all known records for logo overkill - down the bottom there are no less than 16 logos for the various companies and technologies involved!

A lyrics and credits booklet for the audio CD is a welcome inclusion.

An energy-packed record of Morissette’s 2002 tour that’s generous in length and fascinating in content, Feast On Scraps is a must for fans and a good way for the uninitiated to get their heads around an Alanis live show and all that surrounds it. There’s only one extra of any real note - but it’s effectively a new CD album, making this set particularly desirable.