a-ha: The Videos

So I've been a fan of a-ha for quite some time. They're calling it quits this year, with their final concert taking place in Oslo this December. Not surprisingly, their record company took this opportunity to release a compilation album (the third compilation album for a-ha, the first one being Headlines and Deadlines: The Hits of a-ha in 1991 and the second a-ha: The Singles 1984 - 2004 from, well, 2004). This year's release was simply titled 25 and contained not twenty-five, but a whopping 39 a-ha tracks spread across two CD's (remember those, kids?). This included every single the band ever released, as well as a decent selection of good album tracks.

More recently, I stumbled upon a Deluxe Edition of 25, released (as far as I know) only in Germany. What makes this release attractive is the inclusion of a DVD containing 17 of the band's numerous music videos. With the last video compilation from a-ha being the by now almost two decades old Headlines and Deadlines: The Hits of a-ha, a more up-to-date collection is most welcome to fans. Short story shorter; I ordered it and it arrived in my mail box this morning.

Unfortunately, the DVD turned out to be something of a disappointment. Now, let me preface my complaints with saying that I am well aware of the fact that many of a-ha's original fans are now middle aged women who fall well outside of the nerd demographic and are thus unlikely to notice or care about this particular matter. But me, I'm an honest-to-goodness twenty-something (for a few more weeks, anyway) geek, and in my little world the work that's been done is nothing short of catastrophic.

To be fair; there are some positive aspects to this release. As I mentioned previously, the last video compilation from a-ha is from the early 90's, and with that being the case, a-ha: The Videos features several music videos that have never been commercially available before. Among them is the ultra-rare 1984 version of Take on Me which hasn't been seen since, well, 1984 (in fact, the record company has previously refused to even acknowledge its existence. With that in mind, its inclusion here is especially surprising). That's right, a-ha fans, the infamous "blue video" can now be purchased on DVD. Who'd have ever expected that?

Other previously-unreleased videos that fans have long sought after which are available on this DVD include the original version of I've Been Losing You, Dark is the Night For All, Shapes That Go Together, Angel in the Snow, Did Anyone Approach You, Lifelines and last but not least, the band's farewell song Butterfly Butterfly (The Last Hurrah). And as if that wasn't enough, several of the videos included here that were previously released as part of the Headlines and Deadlines compilation feature here as alternate versions, also previously unavailable.

So far, so good. So what's the downside here? After doing that much right, what could they possibly have screwed up so badly on a simple music video compilation that I'd use the word "catastrophic"? Well, how about replacing all the music??

Okay - that probably sounds a bit more dramatic than it is. From what I can tell, what they've done is replaced the original audio in the videos with audio taken from the actual CD's. Which, I suppose, wouldn't be so bad… if they had bothered to actually use the correct tracks. They wouldn't have been too hard to find or anything, heck, some of them were on the actual CD's this DVD came with.

As it is, they've used the album version for each and every song. Now, for some videos (for instance, Stay on These Roads or Did Anyone Approach You?) that works out just fine and dandy, but many of the videos used different, shorter edits/mixes that differed from the album versions. Obviously, the full album versions of the songs don't match the shorter lengths of the videos, so they've edited down the songs to compensate… but not in the same way the original edits were shortened. As a result, we end up with a bunch of videos that features incorrectly edited versions of the songs. In some cases, this is only noticeable if you're familiar with the videos to a geeky degree, while in others it is painfully obvious as the music may not match the visuals at all (it is appallingly apparent during parts of The Sun Always Shines On TV, for one).

I can't even imagine why they would pull something like this. My first thought was that it might have been an attempt to improve the audio quality, but if that is the case then the FAIL level of this release truly reached EPIC because the sound is really not that good on some of the affected videos. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say some probably sounded better before.

My second thought was that it may have been a rights issue, but on the other hand – if they had the rights to release the music, and they had the rights to release the videos… then it is not much of a stretch to assume they also had the rights to release the audio tracks for those videos.

So, all in all? I do not regret the purchase, as I now have more of a-ha's music videos on DVD than I did before and most (but not all) of the videos that got messed up by the music replacement I already have on the Headlines and Deadlines DVD anyway. But as it stands, this DVD is useful for completist purposes only, because it's certainly not a good representation of a-ha's music video history.