Tad: Busted Circuits and Ringing Ears

This film spans the entire career of TAD, featuring archival live footage, interviews, music videos, and lost footage, as well as new footage and interviews with the band members and Krist Novoselic (Nirvana), Mark Arm (Mudhoney), Kim Thayil (Soundgarden), Chad Channing (Nirvana), and many others. TAD took the idea of playing LIVE very seriously; it was a life or death matter. This documentary not only stands as testimony, but it’s also a cinematic document of the world’s HEAVIEST band EVER (as Bruce Pavitt so incisively puts it) boldly stretching that assertion beyond any previously known limitations. Better than a tattoo, it’s an open scar that roars, a broken alarm bell ringing from the lost event horizon of a long-dead star, one would never see – that is, until this film clipped it back onto the light box of the silver screen, where it can be deciphered and viewed anew. This documentary telescopes the musical pathology of TAD down to the image of an electrocardiograph recording the minor-mode melody of a final infarct, a demented soundtrack that is neither tame nor de-clawed. It was never meant to be. Dare to feel it, and risk bleeding internally.