"Actor: Alice In Chains"

• Alice In Chains - Unplugged | DVD | (12/06/2000) from £7.45   |  Saving you £-1.46 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  This is the 1996 MTV New York show, which proved there and then that Alice's unique brand of dark existentialist metal (talk about being number one in a field of one) never needed wattage to convey that brooding intensity. There are plenty of classics here, including "Nutshell" and "No Excuses", although you won't get any of the earliest stuff and it's a pretty short set overall. While it would be fair to say that this disc could have offered a little more substance, no fan will want to be without it, and experiencing Layne Staley's menacing lisp in the stark environment of an acoustic set somehow returns the whole genre to its roots in the blues. Gnarly.On the DVD: The extra features include a chronology which fearlessly (and with plenty of self-deprecating humour) lists the band's long history of near misses as well as their successes. Also included are some wonderful anecdotes, such as the famous occasion when guitarist Jerry Cantrell missed a gig because he forgot how many days there were in November. There's also a discography and three extra tracks which didn't feature in MTV's original broadcast. --Roger Thomas

• Alice In Chains - Music Bank - The Videos | DVD | (15/12/2003) from £9.70   |  Saving you £-3.71 (-61.90%)   |  RRP £5.99

  That Alice In Chains were, in the early 1990s, routinely bracketed alongside Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden as exemplars of grunge was always more to do with geography than reality. If Alice In Chains had not formed, like all the aforementioned, in Seattle, it is unlikely anyone would have drawn the comparisons. Where Nirvana and those who followed them approached metal through the filters of the British punk of The Clash and the traditional American songwriterly virtues of The Replacements, Alice In Chains were a heavy metal band, pure and simple. Like most successful heavy metal bands, Alice In Chains attracted an unusually devoted fan-base, who will be well rewarded by this generous 94-minute compilation. Music Bank contains all Alice In Chains' videos, plus the kind of curios that suggest that someone, somewhere, has put some thought into this. The clips are broken up with grabs of on-the-road footage shot by the band themselves, and the programme begins with a local television documentary made about the band before they'd signed their record deal: the scenes shot in the kitchen of the house the band were sharing at this point are probably best avoided by the faint-hearted. On the DVD: the DVD has two audio options: PCM stereo and surround sound. There are interactive menus with which to select individual clips, and a nicely designed but basically redundant video discography. --Andrew Mueller

• Various Artists - Hard 'n' Heavy Vol. 1 | DVD | (02/08/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £16.99

  Music videos with rarely seen live footage and in-depth interviews with some of the greatest bands in rock history!