Protest the Hero – Kezia X

 

This is a trailer for the documentary Kezia X. Here is a review from Metal Sucks.

 

For a band as modern as Protest the Hero, there’s something delightfully old fashioned about their new concert film, Kezia X Live: you can actually see it. Documenting a trio of 2015 performances celebrating the tenth anniversary of their debut full-length, Kezia, the 54-minute movie utilizes the now de rigeur apoplectic editing and convulsive filming style of modern videos sparingly, and only when the energy of the on-screen performance justifies it. It does what concert films really should do, but achieve with increasing rarity: it allows the viewer the right mix of vicarious thrill of being at the performance and the chance to see what the show might be like if the viewer wasn’t being jostled in the pit.

This is especially impressive because Kezia X Live incorporates footage from all three concerts. I don’t mean from song to song, like “Bury the Hatchet” is from one show and “Nautical” is from another; I mean it cuts between footage from all the shows within a single track. But even with the inclusion of a speech from frontman Rody Walker pointing a flaw in the filmmakers’ continuity plans (the band was instructed to wear the same clothes for each concert… but one of those concerts took place at a different venue from the other two), the constant switching around is fairly seamless, with a removed or repositioned article of clothing usually the giveaway. Kezia X Live is the opposite of Nine Inch Nails’ And All That Could Have Been (2002), which similarly pulled footage and audio from multiple shows, but ultimately felt like a violent collage of footage, and not one fluid experience. There’s no issue here.