Review of Music In High Places: Joy Enriquez

Introduction

Music in High Places is an American television series where recording artists visit sacred sites around the globe, going on tours visiting the sights and sing "unplugged". Apart from Joy Enriquez in Puerto Rico, other artists include Alanis Morissette in Navajo Nations, Boyz II Men (Seoul, South Korea), LeAnn Rimes (Yucatan Peninsula), Shawn Colvin (Bora Bora and Tahiti) and Mya (Sicily) to name but a few. It`s a nice idea if you`re into the artists music and would like to see their performance in different surroundings. Onto Joy Enriquez then.

I know what you`re probably thinking; here is yet another emerging star of the music industry...how many are there every week? Young and good looking with catchy dance songs or ballads aiming for the top spot in one of the most fickle industries on the face of the planet.

Our young starlet here is 20 year old Mexican-American Joy Enriquez who fits the profile, but can she prove herself? She sang background vocals for Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey`s "When You Believe" (The Prince of Egypt) and recorded the ballad, "How Could I Not Love You", for the `Anna and the King` soundtrack. She`s also worked with a lot of top flight producers such as Babyface, Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam with a musical style that`s a fusion of latino and R&B. She`s yet to really break into the UK market and this DVD might well be one way of sneaking her in.

All the songs here are performed live and acoustically and vary in pace from gentle ballads to more dancey numbers and there isn`t a dance troupe in sight. In between singing songs, there are clips of our Joy taking a tour of the city, taking in the smells and sounds of the place against a gorgeous looking backdrop. This is almost like a holiday show.

Video

Music in High Places is clearly shot with a 1.85:1 frame but is not anamorphically enhanced. When the image is zoomed into there is some loss of resolution and detail. Also there`s the subtitle of the locations and this goes off screen if you`ve zoomed the picture to fill a widescreen TV. The locations used in Puerto Rico are great, and sadly some of this is lost with the lack of an anamorphic transfer. The transfer could have been handled so much better than this.

Audio

There`s a choice of two soundtracks here, DD5.1 and DD2.0. The DD5.1 track sounds pretty good to spread the sound evenly across the front three speakers while the DD2.0 track is a pretty ordinary soundtrack on two speakers. The music here is all acoustic so there are no real challenges for the sound system to undertake. Everything sounds well balanced.

Features

Special Features includes: Behind the Scenes, Interview, Promo Spots, Location Footage, Just the Music and a Biography.

Behind the scenes is a nine minute featurette which is quite brief but you see the crew behind the programme. The interview with Joy is 29 minutes long and quite interesting. The way the interview plays is questions are asked off camera and she answers them. Later in the interview we actually hear the questions being asked. Location Footage is a 35 minute documentary which is pretty self explanatory and quite interesting too.

Just the Music is a chapter selection of all nine songs on the DVD and you can select just to play the songs without all the talking bits in between. Lastly the biography is a bunch of text pages about Joy. I never expected to see this much behind the scenes stuff which adds up to just over an hour, longer than the actual main programme and is a welcome change. There are French and two German subtitle tracks but no English present. I couldn`t hear all the lyrics so English would have been a good addition.

Conclusion

This DVD seems to be part about Joy Enriquez and part The Holiday Programme. We follow her around Puerto Rico visiting the zoo, caverns and other places and in between she performs songs too. I guess it`s a different take on music programmes, and one which is ideally suited to television.

Joy`s music here seems to be a mixture of nice ballads and a catchy dance number, all well performed, but just watching her on screen with the musicians doesn`t exactly enthrall me. The idea of music promos is that they`re exciting, different, compulsive and more to the point, memorable. Plus the better ones make for good background music too. Here however, there isn`t that visual impact.

I don`t think there`s a lot of replay value in this DVD. As much as I enjoyed watching it the first time around, it`s not something I`m going to watch again for a few years. Joy`s music is quite nice, and she seems pretty down to earth, but the idea of sight seeing mixed with singing performances just doesn`t work well enough for me to continually play this DVD. I`d like to see her in music videos, dancing, singing and enjoying herself and in turn making me enjoy it all.

I do like the look of Puerto Rico, and if I ever stop buying DVDs, I`ll go there and check it out. As for this DVD, nice try, but not worth a buy.