Label: Blaze Bayley Recordings
Production: Chris Appleton
Release date: 03.04.2020
Album length: 109:45 min
Genre: Heavy Metal
Rating: 7.5 / 10
Blaze Bayley, former frontman of Iron Maiden, has by now become a kind of legend of true-blue British metal. The singer refuses to give up and keeps delighting his fans with a steady stream of new studio albums and live documents. Fresh off the final part of his sci-fi concept trilogy “Infinite Entanglement”, he combed the venues of the old continent once again, up and down, and landed in Brno, Czech Republic, at the club Melodka. His show there was dutifully captured on audio. It was filmed too, which means that along with the two discs comes a third. A DVD, of course.
This recording hits bootleg-level quality, and plenty of bootlegs sound better. But that was quietly expected, and it’s no surprise at all to anyone who remembers how our good old Blaze would play in all sorts of godforsaken places, like on 01.05. in the year of our Lord 2010, when he “raised hell” in Ravne na Koroškem, Slovenia. Club conditions. The band was squeezed onto the stage. As a result, the instruments often get in each other’s way within the sonic aura. Let me put it more simply. They “steal each other’s sonic space”, so at times the phrasing overpowers everything else, then suddenly a distinctly rattly bass guitar takes over, trying to chase Steve Harris’s sound, and in the next moment the drum gallop punches through the mix. And every now and then our good old Blaze Bayley drowns out the whole lot too. Bayley, who feels at home in the middle and lower registers, has lost a bit more vocal power over the years. You can hear it on the recording. As expected, he also veered off the ideal lines quite a few times, meaning he (mildly) “botched” it here and there. Anyway, hats off to the band for the guts not to go for “sonic sterilization” of the recording and to keep as much of its authenticity as possible.
The first part of this recording, a summary of two consecutive shows at this club in the middle of Brno (28.09. & 29.09.2019), has Blaze and company playing songs from the current trilogy, cut in the middle by an Iron Maiden classic, the excellent Virus, which is a very prophetic song for these times, except that Blaze didn’t know that back then. In the second part the concert comes alive as the crowd starts abusing their neck vertebrae even more thoroughly, since the setlist increasingly fills up with classics from Blaze’s debut »Sillicon Messiah« (2000), namely the title track, the surprise The Day I Fell To Earth, and Stare At The Sun. This new Bayley live session atmospherically culminates in the expected closing stretch, with Man On The Edge, Futureal and, oh for heaven’s sake, somebody help me! The Clansman, of course.
You have to respect this man’s down-to-earth warmth, his accessibility, his lack of airs. For years he has been visiting every dark and godforsaken corner with his backing bands, even the real concert “holes” if need be, and he always throws a first-class party. Largely thanks to his outstanding gift of the gab. A truly brilliant speaker. A great “blabbermouth”. He can string words together in a single sentence so sweetly that you’re eating out of his hand right away. That makes him a striking, magnetic frontman with giant charisma, and that’s beyond the fact that vocally he isn’t always the most precise. But when you feel his passion, his faith and his dedication, you know you’ve landed in exactly the right place energy-wise. That’s just Blaze Bayley. Okay, you have to know that the sweet words are deliberately so, to sell a CD or a t-shirt more, but still. The man has an incredible heart! And that counts.
The setlist? Updated, naturally, to match Bayley’s latest studio adventures. So a huge surplus of songs from the »Infinite Entanglemet« trilogy, which are solid songs and by and large follow the mold the guy has maintained since the earliest (Wolfsbane too) days of his career. A blend of punch and musicality. Still, artistically Blaze has been a little robbed of freshness lately. So this album too will stay in the shadow of the excellent »The Night That Will Not Die« (2009), just like the other two live albums from 2014 and 2019 (!!!), which weren’t essential either, and, let’s be honest, neither is the new one. So not a single song from the two best albums of Blaze Bayley’s career, »Promise And Terror« and »The Man Who Would not Die«, brings a certain “heartache”. You just have to accept this “robbed” feeling.
So this live album is really dedicated only to the true-blue Blaze Bayley fans, the ones who have backed the guy since time immemorial in his musical career. If you happened to be at the Brno club Melodika that night, DVD included, it makes for an even nicer souvenir.
by: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
CD1.:
01. The Dark Side Of Black
02. A Thousand Years
03. Dark Energy 256
04. The World Is Turning The Wrong Way
05. Human
06. Together We Can Move The Sun
07. Solar Wind
08. Virus
09. Life Goes On
10. Fight Back
11. Silicon Messiah
12. The Day I Fell To Earth
CD2.:
01. Eagle Spirit
02. Calling You Home
03. Stare At The Sun
04. Man On The Edge
05. Futureal
06. The Clansman
Lineup:
Blaze Bayley – vocals
Chris Appleton – guitar
Karl Schramm – bass
Martin McNee – drums
