In brief: Well-produced electronic rock/pop from Italy, obviously influenced by DepMode

I don’t remember exactly where and how I first bumped into Babylonia. I probably heard their rather fantastic single “(If U Want) My Love” which spurred me into blind-buying their first album “Later Tonight v2.0″ from a German online retailer. I enjoyed the album immensely, especially “A Spreading Infection”, one of the v2.0′s extra tracks which was noticeably harder-hitting than the rest of the rather poppy, at times bordering on cheesy, album. In fact, it made such an impression on me that I had to contact the band.

To my surprise, I got a reply. It was from Massimo ‘Max’ Giunta, band’s singer/songwriter/producer, who told me “A Spreading Infection” is a sign of things to come; their next album would be “harder” in style. At the time I welcomed the news.

Some years passed, during which I gently ribbed Max a few times about the album’s slow progression. Now, four years after “Later Tonight”, Babylonia has finally released their second album, “Motel La Solitude”.

Firstly, a word of warning to Babylonia fans: “Motel La Solitude” is almost nothing like the first album. Babylonia has matured considerably in many ways. The production is slicker and more sophisticated, lyrics more polished and grammatically more correct (if pop lyrics can be expected to adhere to grammar) and Max’s vocals show a level of nuance and emotion I wasn’t expecting.

Max’s voice really deserves a paragraph of its own. He’s got one of those voices that comes out sounding completely effortless and natural; hearing him sing gives the impression that he must’ve recorded all his vocals in only one or two takes – no more was needed to achieve perfection. His range is pretty good as well; for best demonstration check out track #4, “Beautiful Losers”. It has a few very Erasure-ish bridges where Max’s glissando channels Andy Bell rather remarkably. The vocals also contain numerous examples of rather brilliant emoting, ranging from pain and anguish to joy. There are a couple of instances where the emotion comes across maybe a bit too strongly for some, but to me it’s all a very welcome change from the dry and impersonal style so common in mainstream pop music.

While Babylonia has matured, the change is not all good. I make no bones about being whole-heartedly into electronic music and having a very refined (“limited”, “narrow” and “prejudiced”, say others) taste in music. I abhor the sound of mostly unprocessed acoustic drums and especially the thrice-damned distorted guitar, screeching away like a tortured pussycat from hell.

Bear with me here for a moment.

You see, Babylonia are fans of Depeche Mode. Like so many artists around the world, they fell in love with electronic music during DM’s Golden Era; the time when DM used electronics as a tool, instead of a gimmick or an empty promise to lure their disillusioned fans back into the fold. As so often happens, the artist begins his/her/their career by emulating Depeche Mode and throughout the years they slowly find their own voice and sound.

Babylonia has a sound of their own, certainly, but they are still following their idols’ musical footsteps by embracing their inner rockstars and bringing a variety of rock elements to the foreground. It might be they are not doing this intentionally but subconsciously. The result, whatever the motivation, is the same.

There’s a reason I classified this album’s genre as “Electronic pop/rock” instead of “Electronic pop” or “Synthpop”. Some tracks are rife with traditional rock’n'roll elements dominating the soundscape, only momentarily taking a backseat to give synths some room to breathe. I’m not saying there aren’t plenty of warm pads, arpeggios and synthlines to enjoy on this album – there certainly are. But Babylonia’s new harder, rockier sound is treading a thin line between electronic music with guitars and rock music with synths. For the most part they pull it off successfully.

Putting my complaints about guitars etc. aside for a moment, I actually liked the album quite a lot. It’s a more cohesive whole than the first album, the quality of song writing is better on average and it’s obvious Babylonia has invested a lot of time in the production and mixing of the album, polishing it to sonical perfection. There’s no shortage of nice chord changes, cool vocal arrangements, strong rhythms or impressive synth sounds here either.

But, like all albums, this one has its hits and misses. It appears to suffer from a lack of obvious hit singles, ones that grab you right away and refuse to let go. There are times when production and arrangement go over the top and choke the life out of an otherwise fine refrain. And, let’s face it, a couple of tracks are swinging a set of hooks so blunt you’ll be forgiven for missing the refrain entirely.

I’ll leave you with some random thoughts written down while listening to the album.

01. A Feeling without a Feeling: Nice intro, followed by a rather basic electro rock beat. Hard to get a proper impression of the whole, structure feels messy. Chorus doesn’t grab me. Not the best possible track to open an album with.

02. The Corner: Starts off with a very DM-ish guitar arrangement. Heavy bass kick and oh yeah, here comes the distorted guitar. A rumbling monster of a track, with Kraftwerkian snaps and three-note arpeggios thrown in. Moody verse opens up to a brighter refrain which falls a bit flat.

03. By My Side: First single from the album and a good choice for a single release. Has the catchiest chorus by far. Very sing-along refrain gets a nice lift from the preceding bridge. One of the best tracks of the album, easily.

04. Beautiful Losers: Nice intro with some synths in the background with distinct vocals on top. Striking difference in tone between parts, like they’re from two totally separate songs. Did I miss the chorus? … Is that Andy Bell?

05. Better Days: More Andy Bell! Very smooth and poppy mid-tempo track that sounds like it could’ve been done by Erasure.

06. Ethereal Connection: Personal Jesus! Oh come on, it’s even got the tickity-tick percussion. It’s not a rip-off really, more of a loving tip of the hat to PJ. This one flows smoothly and switches over to basic 4/4 rhythm for some sections.

07. Myself Into Myself: Ooh, a lovely little 8-note synth melody between vocal bits, this brings back fond memories. Remember when DM used to have distinctive synth melodies, themes, in their songs, like the one in Strangelove? What’s happened to those? Anyway, this could have been a single but I fear the refrain is not strong enough.

08. Requiem For Me: Mid-tempo, ballad-y verses, chorus gets an injection of energy, plenty of nice percussion in the background. Quite a beautiful track, in fact.

09. Soundtrack for an End: Wow, starts with a soundscape that brings to mind Some Great Reward, all echoing with a metallic harpsichord on top. Nice vocal choruses and arpeggios in the background, beautifully warm and low-key refrain. Lovely vocal production throughout.

10. Enough is Enough: Piano-backed ballad, this album’s “Somebody”.

11. Love Not For Me: Starts with a build-up of strings, followed by a rather heavy drum beat, filled out with synths bleeping and blooping. Verse has familiar-sounding synths drifting in and out, it’s all very SOFAD/Ultra, somber and serious. Very nice bridge turns out to be part of the refrain which goes nowhere but sounds very lush doing that.

12. Camera con Vista: Instrumental filler.

13. Waiting for a Sun: Another ballad. Not my cup of tea.

14. Runner in the Night: Long intro exploding into an uptempo banger with a strong 4/4 beat. Aggressive bassline pours more fuel on the fire. Those damn guitars are back with a vengeance. Long stretches of instrumental idling. Hang on, is there really only one verse, followed by several repeats of the refrain?

—

Songs:
Production/mixing/audio quality:

Release date: January 2010
Genre: Electronic pop/rock
Label: Halidon
Review source: CD 16-bit/44kHz

Links: Official Babylonia website
Links: MySpace

Well, Codemasters fucked it up good and proper. They bloody well americanized it. They dumbed it down for slack-jawed yokels. The presentation alone made me struggle to keep down my breakfast: the front-end is jammed full of American X Games celebrities mangling the English language with “hip” street talk and utterly fake enthusiasm. People like Travis Pastrana, Dave Mirra and Ken Block. Remember a game called Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX? Yeah, that’s him. Pastrana? He’s a motocross racer and a stunt performer. Ken Block is a rally driver but I never would’ve known that if I hadn’t googled his name.

The first time you launch the game you’re forced to sit through a demonstration of the menu system. It goes on for so long I was shouting at the screen, “Shut up you wanker and let me race!” And the bloody demo doesn’t even mention Options (or I missed it due to professional-level facepalming) which made me start my first race with an automatic gearbox.

There seems to be very little actual rally driving in DiRT 2. During the hour or so I opened perhaps 20 tracks, among them a maximum of 5 proper rally tracks. And the rest? American stadium-style racing with dune buggies, 4x4s and other most definitely non-rally vehicles, complete with fireworks and cheering crowds. Bullshit, in a nutshell. OK, sure, there were plenty of non-rally races in the first game, but it was never this grandiose or in-your-face.

Let me give you a perfect example of the dumbing down: setting up your car. In DiRT you had several screens filled with a hojillion options. You could really set the car exactly the way you wanted it. In DiRT 2 you get one screen with six settings: gear ratio, downforce, suspension, ride height, differential and brake bias. And if that isn’t frustrating enough, each setting has only five values from low to high. That’s grade-A bullshit right there.

By this time you might be wondering if there’s anything good in this game. Well, yes. It recognized the Logitech G25 wheel automatically and supports the H-grid shifter. Not that you really need it, but anyway. The graphics are slightly better and there’s not quite so much glitching or stuttering. I also have to mention the car handling. In fact, I prefer DiRT 2′s modeling of rally car behavior. It feels tighter, ‘heavier’ and the car feels better connected to the road under it. More authentic, in other words. There were moments in DiRT where the car felt like it was sliding on a thin layer of grease, and I felt I wasn’t really in control of the car properly. There’s less of that in DiRT 2 – as far as rally cars are concerned. I won’t comment on other vehicles.

To recap: nerve-grating presentation, bullshit stadium racing, extremely heavy influence of X Games and Xtreme sports, embarrassing dialogue and voice acting, and populated by celebrities better known for something else than rally driving.

What a way to honor the late Colin McRae. Codemasters, you utter bastards.

So, I naturally hesitated a bit when pondering on the possibility of forking over several hundred Euros for another HTC product. But then I read some encouraging articles about Google’s Android OS and never looked back. The phone arrived on Friday and I spent several hours getting to know it intimately (hur hur) that night. It was, in a word, a revelation. My trusty Nokia E71 feels like a clunky dinosaur and a downright embarrassment next to the Hero. I now understand why people have been so excited about the iPhone. Now, I’ve never used an iPhone – and with the Hero in my hands I probably never have to, either.

Allow me to rattle off some main features really quickly. It’s got a 3.2 inch touch screen with 320×480 resolution, haptic feedback, internal GPS, HSPA/WCDMA support for up to 7.2 Mbps data download, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and A2DP, WiFi 802.11b/g, a 5.0 megapixel camera with auto focus, a proper 3.5 mm audio jack, 165 MB of RAM for applications and comes with a 2GB SD memory card.

Unfortunately you can’t install applications on the SD card — but that 165 MB goes a surprisingly long way, simply because the apps are quite small. At the moment, I’ve got 42 applications installed and there’s still 116 MB of memory left for more apps. The SD card is there as data storage for applications as well as for your music, photos and videos.

I purchased my phone at a UK webstore who shall remain nameless. As expected, the phone’s virtual keyboard did not have Scandinavian accented characters. I could get to them by holding down A and O, but it’s not the same thing. A quick Google search informed me some friendly Norwegian chap had created a Scandinavian keyboard for Android. This led to my first dip into the waters of Android Market.

It’s… well, it’s like the iPhone app store, I guess. Market offers hundreds of games and applications, most of them free. Actually, I don’t see any paid apps at all, but that’s because those haven’t been rolled out in Finland yet. Anyhoo, applications are sorted into several categories such as communication, entertainment, finance, lifestyle, multimedia etc. Downloading and installing them is extremely easy: you just tap the name of the app you’re interested in, read its description and, if you’re so inclined, tap the install button. The phone downloads and installs the app(s) in the background, even if you exit the Market.

Locating the Scandinavian keyboard was easy thanks to a Search function. A few seconds later I was using a virtual keyboard with Scandinavian accented characters in their correct places. Unfortunately the new keyboard has even narrower keys than the standard one, and those weren’t wide enough for my fat fingers. The virtual keyboard remains my biggest gripe with the Hero. Nokia E71 has a QWERTY hardware keyboard which spoiled me rotten. Typing on the E71 is very fast and there’s almost no chance of typos. Not so with the Hero. Having used the phone for three days I’m still making way too many errors; text messages typed and sent in less than 10 seconds on the E71 take 2-3 times longer on the Hero. I’ve read of better keyboards for Android but those seem to be paid apps and thus unavailable to me for the time being.

While we’re listing gripes, here’s another one: battery life. The phone comes with a 1350 mAh Li-ion battery which should have a standby time of up to 440 hours (says HTC). I’m not saying that’s impossible, but to achieve that I’m pretty sure you have to disable most of the phone’s features. Like, absolutely everything.

As I mentioned, the phone arrived last Friday. It’s now Sunday evening, and I’ve already ran the battery dry twice – and it’s at 16% right this very moment. There’s a good reason for all this and it’s called WiFi. You see, some of the apps I’ve installed wish to have constant access to the internet by default. Apps like Twitter, Facebook, Weather, Stocks, email and various others like nothing better than sucking bits off the internet constantly. And since I have several WiFi APs in my house, I let them. (Hah! Hero just beeped to announce the battery’s at 15% and recommends I attach it to a charger. Good timing!) To save battery, I’ve switched the WiFi off for the night. Regardless of that, I’m now charging the battery for the third time in three days. With the WiFi on, you can expect the battery to last for 10-12 hours while using the phone actively. You can extend battery life by telling apps to refresh less often or by setting them for manual refreshes only.

That’s the biggest gripes done with. Let’s talk a bit about how bloody great this phone is. First, the UI. It looks gorgeous, it’s fast and responsive, and although it has a habit of stuttering briefly every now and then, I have to say I love it. Swiping your finger horizontally across the screen brings up more home screens, all of them completely open for user tinkering. You can very easily change the screen layout, delete app shortcuts, add new ones, change the wallpaper etc. You can do a lot of customization on this baby, that’s for certain. You can tweak the phone even further by buying a replacement Home (the UI, in other words) application, if the internet is to be believed. In fact, the phone comes with two different Homes: the default one is called HTC Sense, and if you keep the Home button pressed down for a few seconds, you can switch over to standard Android UI.

The touch screen supports more than one pressure points. This means you can zoom in and out by placing two fingers on the screen and doing a ‘pinch’ or a ‘separate’ move with them. You can also double tap to zoom in and out of a webpage quickly. Yeah, I’m aware this is nothing new to all you iPhone users out there, but do bear in mind I come from Nokia E71 with a Symbian OS.

I also like the trackball. It can really speed up navigation when used simultaneously with the touch screen. It also has a very nice, very hi-resolution granular feel to it under my thumb. You can also press it to select things, like clicking a mouse button. Aaaand it also lights up and blinks to notify you of incoming messages and other stuff.

But by far the nicest thing about the Hero has to be the Android Market. It offers such a wide variety of truly useful applications, and most of them are totally free! I’ve already expanded the phone’s feature set immensely by adding a bunch of apps. Sure, some of them run tiny ads at the bottom of the screen, but so far they’ve been very unintrusive. I’ve also bumped into a few ‘lite’ versions that have been stripped of some of the features available only in the full, paid version. That does irk a bit, but only because paid apps aren’t available in Finland yet. I can easily see myself paying a Euro or two for a useful app so how about rolling them out in Finland already, Google? I’m waiting, with money in hand.

In brief: The most boring album Depeche Mode has ever released.

First off, a bit of a disclaimer. If you’re a Depeche Mode fan, you might get a bit pissed off about what I have to say. You might even see me as a DM hater. If that sounds likely, you can feck right off. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass.

The thing is, I’m probably a bigger fan of Depeche Mode than you. I fell in love with the band in 1981, immediately after hearing Just Can’t Get Enough for the first time. During the years I’ve spent thousands of Euros on their music and merchandise. I’ve seen them live at least 20 times in various European cities and first attended their concert on the Black Celebration Tour, back in 1986. I guess you could say I’m a pretty hard-core fan of DM.

But I’m not a fan of guitars, acoustic drums or rock’n'roll. Give me synthesizers and electro pop; give me fantastic melodies, chord changes and pop hooks that stick in my mind until death. Songs like Strangelove. People Are People. Everything Counts. Enjoy The Silence. Yes, you know what I mean.

I was convinced Alan Wilder’s departure would be the end of Depeche Mode. But no. They took a brief break to sort out their lives and, in the case of Dave, their deaths, and bounced back. Tim Simenon and his team did a pretty good job replacing Wilder, I thought. What’s more, Ultra displayed some excellent song writing.

I think the same applies to Exciter, to some extent. There’s no denying the fact that DM fucked up by hiring/forcing Mark Bell to produce the entire album. Again, the album has a few bloody excellent songs on it, but Gore’s songs were incompatible with Bell’s production.

Playing The Angel was, to me, a welcome return to the halcyon days of Ultra and Songs of Faith and Devotion. The songs weren’t of the quality the fans were used to, certainly, but Ben Hillier’s lush production more than made up for the somewhat lacklustre writing. And who’d have thought Dave Gahan possessed the writing chops to create Suffer Well, one of the album’s highlights?

Three and a half years later, and Sounds of the Universe is now mere weeks from its official release. This is the album which was supposed to take DM back to their electronic roots. Not Speak & Spell; surely nobody expected that. How about Music for the Masses, then? Nuh-uh. Care we hope for the poppy perfection of Violator? You’re having a laugh, mate. “Returning to their electronic roots”. I have no idea who first started that rumour, but it turned out to be complete and utter bullshit. Thanks for getting our hopes up, you douche.

Remember how DM used guitars in the past? They were sampled, processed and combined with other sounds to create something new, something exciting. As the years went on, the amount of processing became less and less, until a guitar on a DM album sounded like… well, a guitar, plain and simple. On Sounds of the Universe the original idea has been turned on its head. Now synths sound like distorted electric guitars. Surely you’ve heard “Wrong”, the first single from the new album? It’s got plenty of synthesizers, but they’re all slightly distorted, growling, resonating buzzsaws, filling in the spectrum like a wall of electric guitars. There’s plenty more of that on the album.

Don’t get me wrong, though. Depeche Mode has not turned into something you listen to while torching a church in Norway. There’s no spikey hockey gear in sight, nor is anyone wearing a black & white clown mask. No, things aren’t quite that bad. To be honest, the album contains quite a lot of clearly synthesized sounds. I can almost hear you go “Ah-ha!” on this revelation. But wait! It’s not what you think. Hillier & DM have taken a two-prong approach to synths on this album.

INTERIOR. STUDIO. MORNING.
Present: producer Ben Hillier, songwriter Martin Gore, accountant Andrew Fletcher

There’s a thump on the door. Ben walks over, opens the door and sees Martin struggling with a tall pile of keyboards.

- “What’s this? More synths?!”
- “Help us out here mate. My back is killing me.”

Together they arrange the keyboards on the studio’s large table.

- “Martin, we really don’t need any more synths. We’re drowning in them as it is!”
- “I know… but we’re supposed to be going back to our electronic roots. Don’t you read the internet? Let’s plug them in!”

Three hours later. A massive fart sound plays from the speakers. Someone is heard laughing and clapping in the adjacent room.

- “Fuck it. I hate synthesizers!”
- “Ohh-kay Mart, take it easy. So what do we do?”
- “Screw the synths. I don’t want to hide behind keyboards anyway. I want to stand on the edge of the stage, pluck a couple of notes and feel the audience love me! Why should Dave hog all the glory?”
- “Rrrright.”
- “Let’s go through all the songs and add a wee guitar solo to each one.”
- “A guitar solo? You mean, like a proper rock’n'roll solo?”
- “Nahh, too much work. A few simple notes I can play in my sleep should do.”

Half an hour later. Martin flicks a guitar pick at the trash can. Ben looks worried.

- “What do we do with all these synthesizers?”
- “Let me think… Got it! Let’s start a couple of tracks like this.”

Martin taps his finger on the table, playing a series of sixteenth notes.

- “Just a single note?”
- “Yeah! It’s electronic! That’ll shut the synthpoppers up.”
- “But Martin… we’re burying all that under a wall of guitars and live drums a few seconds later! You honestly think you can fool them with that?”
- “Probably not. Good point. Ah, to hell with it. Add a few synthesized plinks, plonks and sproings whenever there’s room in the mix and Bob’s your uncle!”

So, yeah.

1) Start the track with one or two synths playing the most simple melody you can imagine, let them play for a few seconds, then bury them under other instruments.

2) Use synths as sound effects to fill in any “empty” gaps in the songs.

INTERIOR. STUDIO. DAY.
Present: producer Ben Hillier, songwriter Martin Gore

Ben and Martin are listening to a mix of ‘Peace’.

- “There you go, Mart. You guys haven’t had a track this electronic since Exciter.”
- “Hmm… it’s still missing something. Oh, I know!”
- “Go on…”
- “Some guitar!”
- “*facepalm* Of course.”

Martin stands up and skips happily towards the guitar rack. He doesn’t notice the one already plugged in and trips on its lead. The guitar falls down on the floor and Martin lands on its strings face first.

- “Got it in one, thanks.”

Martin removes a pick from his nostril and looks up, flummoxed.

- “Eh?”
- “Yeah, that’ll do fine. I’ll slap that in at the end… there… save it… aaand we can break for lunch.”

In all seriousness, though, “Peace” can honestly be labeled ‘electronic pop’. But that’s the only one on an album of 13 tracks. It’s not a very good song, either.

And therein lies my biggest issue with SOTU. It doesn’t have any good songs on it. Not a single one. Really. “Peace” is probably the best of the crop. But had it been placed on, say, Black Celebration or Music for the Masses, it would have easily stuck out as the worst track of the album.

Sounds of the Universe is populated entirely by mediocrity. There’s no passion, no soul, not a single unforgettable hook in any of the tracks. Gore’s songs reek of a song writer way past his prime, now running on automatic, churning out songs that could have been written by almost anyone. Gahan, along with his writing partners, is still struggling for respectability in Gore’s shadow, all too often falling back to clichés and lazy, instantly forgettable melodies.

Sure, there are some brief glimpses of greatness hidden among the turds. However, those are limited to a nice chord change in one song, a clever arrangement to enhance the refrain or a nice change in atmosphere for the bridge in another. Fleeting, all too brief glimpses that have absolutely no chance in rescuing the whole from being the most boring, most disposable album Depeche Mode has ever released.

INTERIOR. STUDIO. MORNING.
Present: producer Ben Hillier, songwriter Martin Gore, singer Dave Gahan

Ben frowns and looks up from his notes.

- “Lads, I don’t think you’ve got a proper track to release as the first single.”

Martin and Dave glance at each other. Martin grins and picks up a pen and a piece of paper.

- “I can whip something up in no time.”
- “Uh, I don’t think that’s necessary, Mart. I’m sure Dave has some songs we haven’t looked at yet. So, uh, Dave, do you think y–”
- “All done.”
- “…what?”
- “First single. All done.”
- “Let me see that!”

Ben yanks the piece of paper from Martin’s fingers and examines it for a few seconds.

- “Mart… you realize that the verse consists of only two alternating notes?”
- “Uh-huh.”
- “And there’s no refrain!”
- “So?”
- “Mart… mate… this is just wrong.”
- “Ooh! Ooh! Can I use that as the title?”

Songs:
Sound:

Links: Homepage

Release date: 20/4/2009
Genre: Pop/Rock
Label: Mute Records / EMI Records Ltd.
Review source: 192kbps mp3

This Ultimate HD Edition of James Cameron’s seminal action blockbuster was designed and authored by Imagion AG, a German company responsible for Elephant’s Dream, officially the first European HD DVD release. Imagion has pioneered a number of HD DVD (and Blu-ray) related technologies and innovations, created their own authoring tools and applications, and are without a doubt one of the top authoring shops on the planet. T2UE takes advantage of Imagion’s DynamicHD which uses the internet connection of your HD DVD player to add content to the title at any time over the intarwebs. The server for T2UE’s internet features is not activated before March 20th (T2UE’s official release date) which very effectively stopped me from testing the connectivity features.

So, in goes the disc to my Toshiba HD-XE1. First up, Kinowelt’s logo with DTS-HD HR audio, followed by Imagion’s logo accompanied by a rather bombastic DTS-HD MA soundtrack. An announcement flashes by, something to do with “accessing Skynet”, but Skynet is still down. Then… 30 seconds of black screen. No warnings, announcements, zip, nada, and the player looks like it’s doing nothing. Turns out the time was spent moving a bunch of code to player’s memory for the rendering of quite an elaborate main menu. It looks very nice indeed; metallic gray, high definition, with video and audio playing in the background. And menus are in English – which is nice. Unfortunately Kinowelt’s goodwill towards (remaining) HD DVD enthusiasts around the world runs out quite soon after that: most of the text within the special features is in German. One nice little touch is the info box which tells you which audio and subtitle is currently selected, and which chapter of the movie you’re viewing at the moment.

Some tech specs, then. The movie happens to be the Director’s Cut, with a runtime of approx. 153 minutes. It’s got four soundtracks, two of which are dubbed in German. The primary English audio is encoded in DTS-HD High Resolution. I haven’t been able to play the disc on a PC yet, so I haven’t a clue about its bitrate, but hunch says it’s somewhere around 2mbps. Secondary English audio is specially encoded to create some sort of a surround feel when listened to on headphones.

The DTS-HD HR track… well, Terminator 2 has never, ever, before sounded this good. The 7.1 (oh, indeed!) channel mix has oodles of dynamics, it’s crisp and crystal clear, with well defined surrounds and a nicely enveloping sound field. The sound mix during the first brief battle actually made me laugh out loud. It’s like the sound (re)mixer wanted to draw attention to the fact that this is a real 7.1 channel mix by pumping a massive explosion into the two rear surrounds. Well, he succeeded admirably, I can tell you that much.

There are two commentary tracks. First one is a compiled from almost 100 separate interviews, featuring James Cameron and the cast and crew. Second commentary was recorded in 2003 for the DVD release of Director’s Cut. Cameron is accompanied by William Wisher, who co-wrote the screenplay.

Oh yeah, picture quality. It looks better than ever, certainly, but let’s face it, T2 has never been a slick, ultra-sharp movie when it comes to picture quality. It was shot on Super35 and contains a large number of very grainy shots. One can’t expect a razor sharp transfer when the original footage was never nowhere near that. This Ultimate Edition looks better than any of the earlier releases, HD or SD, but don’t expect reference PQ.

In addition to regular viewing mode there’s a selection of four special viewing modes. Quiz mode asks the viewer 76 multiple-choice questions during the movie, ranging from incredibly easy to simply easy. A scoreboard on top of the screen keeps tally of how many you got correct or incorrect. Inside T2 mode is the equivalent of U-Control and In-Movie Experience. Windows pop up every now and then, displaying production photos and video interviews. Spy mode is quite amusing, as it points out the numerous mistakes and blunders that found their way into the final movie. First we get a text description of the error (in German, meh), after which playback pauses for a moment while the offending detail is pointed out by cropping the image to highlight it. There’s also an Interactive mode, but that relies on DynamicHD so I couldn’t test it yet.

You can also view the movie in script form (in English), in storyboards only, and as a combination of script, storyboard and the finished film. There’s also a number of deleted scenes for your viewing pleasure and most of them offer optional commentary. Luckily for the non-Germans among us, Kinowelt has not gone through the trouble of dubbing commentary tracks in German.

There’s a huge amount of content under the main menu heading Departments. If you happen to own some or all of the previously released Laserdisc and DVD Special Editions, you’ve already seen all this content in one form or another. The presentation of it deserves a mention, though. Imagion has created a very slick and easy-to-use menu system, and also done one hell of a job assembling it all into a pleasing whole. Like I mentioned, most of the text within this section is in German, but there are lots and lots of photos and undubbed videos to view. According to Imagion, the disc contains also a number of Easter Eggs but I haven’t had time to search for them yet.

Time for a wrap party, then. This is most definitely the definitive HiDef release of Terminator 2 – and I say this before seeing any of the internet-enabled special features. It’s got good picture quality, absolutely smashing audio, cool menus and more bonus features than you can shake a stick at. Granted, some of it is in German, and you can’t switch to English audio in some of the special viewing modes which can diminish the fun quite a lot… but this is a German release, after all. And at this stage of HD DVD’s lifecycle beggars really can’t be choosers, now can they?

Terminator 2: Ultimate HD Edition (HD DVD)
Video: 1080/24P (VC-1), AR 2.35:1
Audio: German DTS-HD HR 7.1 & Headphone-Surround, English DTS-HD HR 7.1 & Headphone-Surround
Subtitles: German and Turkish