ATP! Review: Pierce The Veil - This Is A Wasteland (DVD)

There's two kinds of shows: shows that have barricades, and shows that don't," and Vic Fuentes and company - collectively known as Pierce The Veil - are clearly fans of the latter. Their first DVD, entitled This Is A Wasteland, follows the San Diego four-piece all over the world (including their very first awards show – the Kerrang! Awards – a highlight of the film), using the satisfyingly familiar "band DVD formula" created by blink-182 on their The Urethra Chronicles series and a formula further explored on Simple Plan's A Big Package for You. Though PTV share little in common, musically, with those titans of their respective genres, the stylistic similarities found in This Is A Wasteland lend further evidence to the theory that a band like Pierce the Veil uniting with a band like All Time Low (current champions of pop/rock) actually makes much more sense than one would imagine.

The DVD cornerstones are all here - party footage (drinking game idea: take a shot of Jameson every time a bottle of Jameson appears onscreen; you might run out of Jameson), rehearsal footage, joke footage, famous friends footage (the aforementioned All Time Low make several appearances, as do the gentlemen of Sleeping With Sirens; hell, there's even some off-camera, almost-cameos from members of Queen, Metallica, and A$AP Rocky), and even some slight tour hiccups (a broken leg overseas, a show shut down by local authorities). It's worth noting, though, that the cinematography of much of this footage is actually rather remarkable. One can attribute this to the ubiquity of HD recording equipment, what with iPhones no longer being any sort of "status symbol," but credit must also go to director Dan Fusselman, and even Vic Fuentes himself, who co-edited the 60-minute mini-documentary.

This Is A Wasteland, like The Urethra Chronicles and similar films before it, will likely serve the same purpose to a new generation of music fans: a visual handbook on how to start your own band, how to dress like you're actually in a band, how to have a great amount of fun while doing so, and - yes - how to drink a lot of fucking Jameson.

4/5

Trace William Cowen

This Is A Wasteland will be released on November 25th via Fearless Records.