(Eagle/Shock)

The Wu’s 2007 performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland

Apart from the late ODB the entire crew’s here, even supplementary members like DJ Mathematics who gets the crowd riled up just by making the W with his hands before the rest emerge. They fly through a set of 32 tracks that covers all the hits like Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nothing Ta F’ Wit and C.R.E.A.M. (with some references to Swiss Francs thrown in for the locals) as well as a few of the highlights from their solo outings, like GZA’s Liquid Swords and Ghostface Killah’s Fish. It’s all shot in an unfortunately by-the-numbers style, camera-swapping every few seconds so that if a cameraman does lock onto something interesting – an arm on stage bouncing in time with an ocean of them in the crowd, Method Man bopping like a maniac – it’s replaced too soon by another ordinary shot of everybody walking back and forth. RZA ducks and weaves like he’s under fire in Careful (Click Click) and Meth gets right into the spirit of things, explaining to the audience, “The energy that you give to us, we gon’ give that shit back to you!” That makes it sound like we might as well just keep it and save him the trouble, but he’s definitely the most fun to watch. Ghostface on the other hand turns out to be a whiny brat, complaining that the crowd aren’t getting into Shimmy Shimmy Ya enough for his liking and demanding the song be started over. Given that they’re cramming 32 songs into 94 minutes by trimming verses all over it’s a frustrating waste. The overall quality shines through, but only just.

***     

JODY MACGREGOR

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