Duran Duran: Arena : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Listening to 'Arena' is like watching TV with the sound turned down: you get the feeling that some vital element in the presentation is missing. Without the diversion of their adorable mugs flashing across an overhead screen, Duran Duran's live album must stand or fall on the merits of the music and the recording. And fall it does.

It is, first of all, a rather pointless in concert rehash. Arena adds no new material to the Duran canon save for the decidedly unspectacular studio single "The Wild Boys," which sounds like a molted version of "Union of the Snake": same reptile, new skin. And none of the nine live tracks has been significantly changed from the studio versions.

Duran Duran added four auxiliary musicians on their '84 tour, but the horn player is only occasionally heard here, and the backup singers and the percussionist are mixed right out of the arena. It's a chilly night indoors as well: the feeling of distance between the band members and their audience, who are reduced to a remote metallic roar, is palpable.

The band has chosen an unsettling and cheerless program of songs with which to document their recent tour as conquering superstars. The album commences energetically enough with the punchy one-two of "Is There Something I Should Know?" and "Hungry Like the Wolf" but quickly slows to a dirge with the moribund pretensions of "New Religion" and "Save a Prayer." It's a pressure drop from which Arena never recovers, particularly on the catatonic second side. When the band finally kicks into a headlong version of "Careless Memories," it's a firecracker lit too late to rescue Arena from its static somnambulism.