Reviews

A music video simultaneously caters to two very different purposes. For a band, it's a medium with which to use visuals to attempt to explain their visions in a different form. At the same time, for these same bands—and probably more importantly their labels—it's essentially an advertisement for the album. As such, it's hard not to look skeptically upon label DVDs (and compilations) as being duped into essentially buying advertising. Unless you're a hardcore fan of the label, or, as is often the case with audio comps, the disc offers special, previously unreleased material, it's hard to justify dropping the money for a series of advertisements, unless you're a really adventurous consumer and want to try out a large number of unfamiliar bands at once. Especially with today's technology and most bands posting their videos on their websites, YouTube, and just about everywhere else, it takes something the caliber of No Idea's "Fest 3" DVD (64 songs, $10) to make a comp seem worthwhile.
 
To the defense of Engineer Records, the 20 videos on this DVD do back up their claim of a diverse lineup. There are a wide variety of rock styles present, from full-throttle hardcore, to indie, to more pop-influenced punk. As a result of this diversity, depending on taste, viewers will probably enjoy certain bands much more than others, but it does seem that a large percentage of the roster is worth checking into further, as there are many good acts here (as far as one can tell from one song samplers).
 
Unfortunately, there isn't as much diversity in terms of the videos. Some are high quality, but many more appear to lean towards the low-budget end of the spectrum. Ironically, it's some of the lower budget videos that are more entertaining, with more creative ideas popping up in videos like "All This Was Funny Until She Did The Same Thing To Me" by andthewinneris. A large majority of the videos are the standard fare, "hey, this is us playing live in a room/on a stage," that everyone has seen a million times.
 
(Caution: Boring Technical Tirade [skip to next paragraph if you don't give a shit]) The DVD also appears cheaply put together and the structuring is absolutely terrible. Unless you plan on sitting down and watching all 20 videos at the same time, it's a tedious task to get to what you want. If you select "Play All," it is set to play the sequence of files separately and in an order, instead of putting them on one timeline (e.g. instead of first video being chapter 1, second video being chapter 2, they are all chapter 1 and are called up separately). What this means is that you cannot use the "next chapter" button to skip forward through tracks; you have to wait for fast forward to cycle through. If you go to chapter select, it only plays the video you choose and then goes back to the menu, instead of continuing from there. The first block of them aren't in the same order as the play all, while the second block is. Really, much more complicated than it should be when anyone could create something 100x simpler with any standard computer program.
 
Point is, it's definitely not a product worth $15, but rather something that should be thrown in as an extra with some of their more prominent bands' albums, as some other labels have started to do. The only thing saving this DVD is some of the musical talent the label has to offer, but save your money and spend an hour on the mp3 portion of the label's website (enginnerrecordsusa.com/label/audio.php) to find some cool, new bands.