METALLICA: Six Feet Down Under

Released: September 20, 2010

Tonight, Metallica kicks off the second leg of their sold out Australian tour with a show in Brisbane. So what does an old, ardent fan do when one has no ticket to any of these events, other than cry into one's beer? This so-called "EP" does provide the opportunity for a trip down memory lane to the band's previous Down Under tours, so one could start there.

Labels like to have some product for a band to promote while they're on tour, but when the band is Metallica, the album's two years old and they won't allow permission for a special "tour edition", what can you do? You grab a bunch of bootlegged live tracks recorded on previous "Trans-Tasman" tours (as the booklet is at pains to point out, although no NZ shows made the cut) and turn them into the world's longest EP. Metallica are old hands at this "official bootleg" caper of course, but the results on this occasion turn out to be perhaps the rawest-sounding live takes officially released by any band ever. The first three are especially rough. "Through the Never" sounds like it was recorded on a mobile phone (which I'd almost believe if it wasn't from '93) and the recording quality of the first two is also very bad, to the degree where Metallica is almost entirely drowned out by people talking nearby a couple of times. The off-key harmonies in "...And Justice for All" are also very jarring. If this were a DVD or an actual concert, you probably wouldn't even notice. But because it's not, it's very, very obvious.

Things get better later on. Both "The Unforgiven" and the remarkable acoustic version of "Low Man's Lyric" complete with hurdy-gurdy are perfectly acceptable and it's great to hear them tear out "Fight Fire with Fire". But in all seriousness, there isn't really any reason for this to exist. Most of the tracks have probably been on YouTube now for years and despite the plea from the band in the booklet to "please don't take this too seriously", it's a bit cynical to expect people to fork out for a collection of (mostly) terribly recorded live tracks. On the plus side, this is being marketed as an EP (despite being five minutes longer than Ride the Lightning), so it only costs about $15. And that's fine, until you discover that it's only part one, meaning you're up for more cash in another month or so, when the second one comes out.

1. Eye of the Beholder
2. ...And Justice for All
3. Through the Never
4. The Unforgiven
5. Low Man's Lyric
6. Devil's Dance
7. Frantic
8. Fight Fire With Fire

Rating: 55%

HALFORD: Live in Anaheim - Original Soundtrack

Released July 2

Just shy of a year since Judas Priest's live statement A Touch of Evil, Halford has issued this "soundtrack" to the forthcoming DVD of the same name (due August). Unlike Priest's disappointingly brief set however, this one weighs in with a hefty 23 tracks and brings together cuts from the three metallic phases of his career. Recorded back in 2003, before he finally rejoined his famous band, Live in Anaheim sounds more like Judas Priest than Judas Priest then did, a searing, energetic, thoroughly metal concert powerhouse.

The strength of any live album relies on its track-listing. Iron Maiden's have repeated the same songs so often that most of them are redundant, but even though this is the second live release for a band that had only done two studio albums at the time, Halford comes up trumps here. True, some of the tracks were also on Live Insurrection and two featured on A Touch of Evil but there's also a rare concert reading of the awesome "Rapid Fire" and the Stained Class track "White Heat Red Hot" that Halford announces has never been played live before, along with "Never Satisfied", a deep album cut from Rocka Rolla!. The version of "Painkiller" that opens this release blows the one from last year right out of the water and "Diamonds and Rust" is fully metalised, totally dispensing with acoustics. The band, Roy Z, Metal Mike, Bob Jarzombek and Mike Davis, are superb and Halford is spectacular. Much has been said in recent years about Rob's decaying voice, but here it only partly lets him down once. After pushing himself to the limits of his range in "Resurrection", he sounds almost out of puff during "Made in Hell" only to recover nicely in time for the Gothically sinister "Golgotha" -- one of two tracks (along with "Heretic") that are repeated in alternative, "bonus" versions on disc two that aren't included on the DVD, and probably added mainly so the twin CDs aren't seriously lop-sided. Whether they are completely necessary or not, they don't subtract from the quality. Indeed it would be hard to be disappointed with this other than some minor quibble over the track-listing but without a serious dud on here you'd be hard pressed to argue even with that.

Live in Anaheim is a stunning, heavy-hitting metal show that is testament to Halford's experience and prowess. A seriously good live album.

CD 1:

1. Painkiller
2. Rapid Fire
3. Heretic
4. Resurrection
5. Made in Hell
6. Golgotha
7. Into the Pit
8. Light Comes Out of Black
9. White Heat, Red Hot
10. Never Satisfied
11. Breaking the Law
12. Hearts of Darkness
13. Handing Out Bullets

CD 2:

1. Diamonds and Rust
2. Hellion
3. Electric Eye
4. Riding on the Wind
5. Victim of Changes
6. You've Got Another Thing Comin'
7. Heretic (live in Japan)
8. Sun (live in Japan)
9. Golgotha (live in Japan)
10. One Will (live in Japan)

Rating: 85%

JUDAS PRIEST: A Touch of Evil: Live

Released: July 14

Judas Priest don’t have the catalogue of live albums that Iron Maiden has (but then, who does?), yet even so A Touch of Evil racks up their fifth, recorded over the course of their last two world tours. The most immediately noticeable aspect is the album’s brevity: while the other two live documents I've reviewed recently are double CDs clocking over ninety minutes, A Touch of Evil is barely an hour, and that’s with three songs longer than seven minutes apiece. The other thing is the track-listing, an unconventional collection of newer tracks and lesser-known older tunes like "Riding on the Wind" (it's from Screaming for Vengeance) that deliberately omits most of their best known songs. Priest deserve credit for this, because it would have been easy to go the Maiden route and just fill two CDs with hits we’ve all heard thousands of times (this is a band who have also never felt it necessary to do a "heritage" tour either, something else that would have been quite easy for them to do). Even better, while three of these tracks have been on live albums before, none of them were with Rob Halford's vocals. So what this lacks in playing time it makes up for in being essentially a rather unique set.

The great thing about this is that even without all the "hits", Judas Priest has still managed to fill this album with great songs, including some of their truly heaviest moments like "Between the Hammer and the Anvil" and particularly "Dissident Aggressor" which was, for its time, one of the most crushing songs ever. "Death" is arguably the only misfire here, an unweildy behemoth of a track that lacks the energy of "Riding on the Wind" that precedes it and the hooks of "Beyond the Realms of Death" that follows. It was one of the better songs on Nostradamus, true, but that's not saying a lot. Thankfully, the only other song from that album here is "Prophecy". "Painkiller" closes the set, and it's clear that Halford has some problems with his pitch here although most of the time he's great (better, it has to be said, than Dickinson on Flight 666, though to be fair Bruce still moves on stage like a guy half his age and Rob barely moves at all) and the rest of the band cannot be faulted.

A Touch of Evil is a pretty good offering as far as live albums go, especially as it does give some of Priest's lesser-known but still killer tracks an airing. The only realy criticism is that it's so short. Another disc with stuff like "Starbreaker" and "Rapid Fire" on it as well would have been ultra cool.

1. Judas Rising
2. Hellrider
3. Between the Hammer and the Anvil
4. Riding on the Wind
5. Death
6. Beyond the Realms of Death
7. Dissident Aggressor
8. A Touch of Evil
9. Eat Me Alive
10. Prophecy
11. Painkiller

Rating: 80%

IRON MAIDEN: Flight 666 - The Original Soundtrack

Produced by Kevin Shirley
Released: May 25

Most of Iron Maiden’s live albums since Live After Death have been hit and miss affairs and all of them feature pretty much the same songs, so the cynical might ask why they’ve deemed it necessary to release yet another one. Of course, Maiden isn’t a band to let a marketing opportunity pass them by, so the soundtrack album to the Flight 666 documentary was always going to be on the cards. At 101 minutes, it’s far shorter than the bloated Rock in Rio set, clocking in at almost the same time as their legendary 1985 document.

Yes, this has the same old standards all the others do (“Number”, “Hills”, “Hallowed”, “Iron Maiden”, “The Trooper”), but also a ton of others that haven’t been featured live in a long time: “Moonchild” and the glorious “Revelations” among them. Each song was recorded in a different city, but to be honest it’s difficult to tell. Anyone who saw the film or actually went to one of the shows on the tour would testify that Iron Maiden were absolutely on fire every night they played, so it could just as easily have been culled from one or two performances. The sound is amazing, possibly the best of any of the band’s live recordings, flawlessly capturing the seemingly unlimited energy of a concert behemoth that few if any of the bands their age can match. Bruce Dickinson struggles to find his range here and there, especially in “Aces High” where he sounds just terrible, and he even defers to Adrian Smith a few times, but it’s otherwise hard to fault this.

Being more or less a modern re-imagining of the classic Live After Death it’s perhaps fitting that it’s almost as good, surpassing all the others that have come in between.

1. Aces High
2. 2 Minutes to Midnight
3. Revelations
4. The Trooper
5. Wasted Years
6. The Number of the Beast
7. Can I Play With Madness?
8. Rime of the Ancient Mariner
9. Powerslave
10. Heaven Can Wait
11. Run to the Hills
12. Fear of the Dark
13. Iron Maiden
14. Moonchild
15. The Clairvoyant
16. Hallowed be Thy Name

Rating: 85%

EDGUY: Fucking With F***

Released: 2009

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Edguy live a couple of times now and they are always an extremely fun band. Even without the visual element of this album’s companion DVD, Fucking With F*** more than adequately demonstrates the good-time vibe of Edguy in concert.

Recorded in front of a rowdy Brazilian crowd in Sao Paolo, Fucking With F*** is 90 minutes of total melodic heavy rock and metal abandon. Both the band and the audience are having an insane time, and Tobias Sammet is pure entertainment. The sound quality is excellent and the track listing is a mixture of their more extended power metal songs like “Vain Glory Opera” and “Tears of a Mandrake” (extended out to 14 minutes with Sammet’s drawn-out band intro spiel) and rock-flavoured songs like “Lavatory Love Machine” and “Superheores”, which are actually better in a live reading than in the studio.

While this is pretty long at over an hour and a half (the CD thankfully leaves out Felix Bonhke’s drum solo), it never drags thanks to a well thought-out set list—even “Save Me” doesn’t cause the pace to drop much—and Sammet’s energy and natural ability as a frontman. When he divides the crowd in half for a sing-a-long in “Babylon” ala Live After Death he almost actually says “Scream for me, Brazil!”, it’s almost as if he’s paying his respects to a major influence on his style.

Live albums can sometimes be pretty dispensible, but Fucking With F*** is one that’s well worth having.

CD 1

1. Catch of the Century
2. Sacrifice
3. Babylon
4. Lavatory Love Machine
5. Vain Glory Opera
6. Land of the Miracle
7. Fucking With Fire (Hair Force One)

CD 2

1. Superheroes
2. Save Me
3. Tears of a Mandrake
4. Mysteria
5. Avantasia
6. King of Fools
7. Out of Control

Rating: 82%

ARCH ENEMY: Tyrants of the Rising Sun - Live in Japan

Directed by Paul B. Smith

Released: November 2008

I really like Arch Enemy. For mine they're one of the best metal bands to have emerged in the last fifteen years. Obviously their success has brought them their fair share of knockers, who like to point out that they can be inconsistent, a little repetitive on occasion and have made a least one rather patchy album, but the same thing can be said for Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and almost anyone else. Angela Gossow usually cops the lion's share of hate for this group, but really most of that is from people who -- despite what they might tell you -- prefer their metal chicks as keyboard players or sopranos in Goth bands. Arch Enemy is a kick ass band, and Tyrants of the Rising Sun shows them doing what they do best: tearing a bunch of Japanese people some new arseholes as they rip through almost two hours of fearsome metal.

Filmed in High Definition with audio in both digital 5.1 and 2.0 and mixed by the inimitable Andy Sneap, this is a veritable feast of modern metal mayhem from start to finish. Featuring songs from their entire career and from every album (except Stigmata), one could hardly ask for a better set. Japan is like a second home for this band and perhaps because of this they pull out all stops, with a virtually flawless show. Gossow sounds awesome and the Amott brothers guitar team is simply breathtaking. Both Christopher and Michael get solo spots, but Daniel Erlandsson's drum solo is actually one of the clear highlights, though perhaps that could be because he ends with a segue into the beginning of Rainbow's "Stargazer" before the band then takes a right turn into "Burning Angel" to kick off the second half of the set.

Japanese crowds can be notoriously polite and low-key, but for Arch Enemy they go totally insane: circle moshes, barrier-surging and singing along with not only the lyrics but the melody lines. Seriously, in "Nemesis" the crowd is almost louder than the band. This helps to make Tyrants of the Rising Sun one of the very best live performance DVDs I've watched in a long, long time. This has excellent sound and perfectly directed visuals, with quite an interesting tour doco as an added bonus and a couple of promo clips (including two versions of "Revolution Begins" which doesn't actually feature in the set), making an all-round killer package no metal fan should be without.

1. Intro/Blood On Your Hands
2. Ravenous
3. Taking Back My Soul
4. Dead Eyes See No Future
5. Dark Insanity
6. The Day You Died
7. Christopher Solo
8. Silverwing
9. Night Falls Fast
10. Daniel Solo
11. Burning Angel
12. Michael Solo (including Intermezzo Liberte)
13. Dead Bury Their Dead
14. Vultures
15. Enemy Within
16. Snowbound
17. Shadows and Dust
18. Nemesis
19. We Will Rise
20. Fields of Desolation/Outro

Extras:

1. The Road to Japan
2. Revolution Begins (original)
3. Revolution Begins (live version)
4. I Will Live Again (promo)

Rating: 95%

DIO: Evil or Divine: Live in New York

Produced by Ronnie James Dio

Released: 2005

Ronnie James Dio is an undisputed master of heavy metal music and such an important figure in its development and sound that it's difficult to imagine what metal would be like without him. Nonetheless, much of his work from the last decade and a half has been less than stellar and I often find myself wondering if he hasn't stuck around just a bit too long (that said, his performance on the Heaven and Hell album from last year is incredible). No better example of this exists than this album, a CD version of a DVD release from two years before.

Evil or Divine: Live in New York would have to be one of the most uninspired “live” albums I’ve ever had the displeasure of hearing. Dio sounds every bit like a man in his 60s and the rest of the band offers a phoned-in performance that does little to generate much enthusiasm for what is essentially a classic batch of songs that deserve much better. I will admit that it starts off ok but about a third of the way through it just loses direction. The riff from “Man on the Silver Mountain” sounds a million years old now and then Doug Aldrich takes a ridiculously painful nine-minute guitar solo that almost made my brain explode. After that, anything would be better but most of Dio’s songs have sounded dated since 1992 and this is nothing but proof of that. Neither evil nor divine, this is merely boring and awful, and at 79 minutes, seemingly endless.

Dio should have stopped making heavy metal records after Angry Machines and gone into a quiet semi-retirement like his old friend Ritchie Blackmore. It’s not as if he wouldn’t be able to afford it.

1. Killing the Dragon
2. Egypt/Children of the Sea
3. Push
4. Stand Up and Shout
5. Rock and Roll
6. Don't Talk to Strangers
7. Man on the Silver Mountain
8. Guitar solo
9. Long Live Rock and Roll
10. Fever Dreams
11. Holy Diver
12. Heaven and Hell
13. The Last in Line
14. Rainbow in the Dark
15. We Rock

Rating: 15%

SEPULTURA: Live in Sao Paolo

Released: 2005

Yesterday I talked about the new Soulfly album, so by way of contrast I'll take a look back at Live in Sao Paolo, Sepultura's live offering from a few years back which was a sadly unspectacular showing from Max Cavalera's former band. For a band that all but imploded just as they’d really broken through and then offered up only a few ordinary albums since it wasn't that surprising that a live album would appear eventually as the band struggled for legitimacy as release after release met with little positive response.

Roorback was the best thing to come from this band for a long time up to this point but even that was pretty well ignored, so a double live CD recorded in the band’s hometown with a few special guests may well have been seen as the way to recover flagging support for a group that was at one point one of the world’s most influential thrash acts. Sepultura has never been the same without Max Cavalera and Derrick Green has always struggled to find acceptance as frontman. In truth the two men don’t really sound that different so that aspect is a moot point from where I stand. What can’t be argued about Live in Sao Paolo is the questionable mix. The vocals and drums are loud and clear but the guitar is often little more than a murky rumble in the background. I’m unsure if this was deliberate to create a more realistic “live” feel, and it does show off Igor Cavalera’s impressive sticks work, but I’ve heard bootlegs that sound better than this album.

With respect to the material included, the 21 tracks do give a nice career overview. Songs from Chaos AD and Roots make up the bulk of the content but all albums are represented. The uninspired cover of “Bullet the Blue Sky” could well have been dropped though, and it’s anyone’s guess as to what they were thinking with the hamfisted version of Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”. Doing much of the stage banter in Portugese and bringing early Seps guitarist Jairo and Max Kolesne from Krisiun out for a couple of tracks is a nice touch, however.

As live albums go, Live in Sao Paolo isn’t great. I haven't seen the DVD taken of the same performance so I don't know if actually watching it would make it better, but the awful mix, the dodgy covers and the long-winded intro are big minuses and make it one for only the most die-hard fans.

CD 1

1. Intro
2. Apes of God
3. Slave New World
4. Propaganda
5. Attitude
6. Choke
7. Inner Self/Beneath the Remains
8. Escape to the Void
9. Mindwar
10. Troops of Doom
11. Necromancer

CD 2

1. Sepulnation
2. Refuse/Resist
3. Territory
4. Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos
5. Bullet the Blue Sky
6. Reza
7. Biotech is Godzilla
8. Arise/Dead Embryonic Cells
9. Come Back Alive
10. Roots Bloody Roots

Rating: 40%

CRYPTOPSY: None So Live

Released: 2003

I have to admit that sometimes Cryptopsy just sounds to me like there‘s too much going on without anyone actually getting anywhere. The overlapping technical riffs and Flo Mournier’s incredible drumming has made them one of the world’s state-of-the-art extreme metal bands, but to me they sometimes sound like just a muddle of ideas without direction. Nonetheless, whether you’re a committed fan or not, if you’ve ever wondered if they can pull it all off live, None So Live shows that Mournier at least can do everything on stage that he does in the studio.

Live albums are questionable at the best of times; over the course of this one’s twelve tracks the vocals and drums are so far at the fore of the mix that they virtually obliterate the rest of the band. This is but one of the album’s shortcomings, and indeed I’d be rather surprised if Cryptopsy’s fans didn’t feel somewhat ripped off by this obvious obligational release. Apart from the crap sound, the track-listing is pretty dubious. Out of the album’s twelve tracks, one is merely the crowd cheering before the band comes on stage and one is a drum solo. Cryptopsy is probably the only band on the planet today that can actually get away with featuring a drum solo on a live album, yet despite Mournier’s abilities on the sticks n’ skins his display here is pretty uninspiring. Thankfully, it’s only short.

Leaving room for only ten actual songs in total, most of which are taken from the first two albums (though “Born Headless” is noticeably absent), None So Live feels incomplete, little more than a stop-gap for the next studio album. Fans will love this; everyone else will most likely think it’s a rip-off.

1. Intro
2. Crown of Horns
3. White Worms
4. We Bleed
5. Open Face Surgery
6. Cold Hate, Warm Blood
7. Phobophile
8. Shroud
9. Grave of the Fathers
10. Drum Solo
11. Defenestration
12. Slit Your Guts

Rating: 45%