Label: Frontiers Music Srl.
Release date: 5/22/2020
Album length: 73.35 min
Genre: Hard Rock
Rating: 8.0/10
Pretty Maids need no special introduction for music lovers “raised” on good, top-quality hard rock! Today Pretty Maids are a bona fide rock legend. They’ve got a truly striking, long-lived career behind them, with a whole pile of studio albums, and not a single one of them is an artistic miss. The eighties were kind to the musically rich varieties of hard rock. The year was 1987, glam metal was already in full bloom, and Pretty Maids had just put out their second studio album, “Future World”. To this day that album is considered essential to their body of work, and it’s also the most cherished studio album among the band’s followers of everything Pretty Maids have released up to now. It’s also the band’s only album to make the Billboard chart, and it sold more than 300,000 copies in the three years after release. It brought the band its breakthrough and popularity.
The years fly by and, sadly, slowly bring more and more health troubles, which vocalist Ronnie Atkins recently had to face too. Anyway. In 2017 and 2018 the band played select festivals and a few times performed a set that covered the entire “Future World” album. Atkins and Hammer refreshed Pretty Maids a while back, and the revamped quintet keeps up its (almost proverbial) top-notch stage execution. Interestingly, Pretty Maids haven’t released many live documents over their career. This new one is, all told, barely their fourth. And, interestingly, it also comes from Japan, just as the concert released in 2002 on the album “Alive At Last” is partly “Japanese” too.
In the set, “Future World” wraps up after barely three quarters of an hour. That leaves another half hour of playing time, and the band fills the last stretch with newer numbers, especially from the album “Pandemonium” onward, the one that put the band back on the European charts after years of drought. Right at the tail end of the show, Pretty Maids tossed in a surprise: the title track of their fourth album, “Sin-Decade”. A fitting pick for the wildly fired-up, steel-plated, vampiric finale that closed the show. Funnily enough, the concert was only an hour and fifteen minutes long. Whoa! Where the heck is Back to Back, which they usually use to close the regular part of their shows? Right. I’m “lying” to you here. Pretty Maids played a set of at least an hour and three quarters. It was in the city of Kawasaki at the club Citta, not in Tokyo as the official promo text from the label Frontiers Music Srl. claims, and with sins of misleading the public like that, they really do confirm their “Italian character”. Pretty Maids played two nights in a row in Kawasaki, on 11/17 and 11/18/2018. What you’ve got in front of you is a live document that’s been trimmed down in time. That is, on one CD and one DVD. The set comes from the first night, and we don’t know how much “patching up” the sound got afterward in the studio, or how much material from the set played the next day was used for it. The sound is great, though, and you can’t hear a single flub in the performance.
On the DVD, besides the concert replay of the CD (shot on film), there are just two documentary films, one from Japan (where the concert is from) and one from the band’s appearance in Balingen, Germany, at the famous Bang Your Head!!! festival. Videos have also been added to the DVD, but nobody would have missed them. Such a shame. At least on the DVD they could have put the whole concert, if the CD already got hit with time cuts. It’s not clear why the label decided to scrimp, but it’s a great pity, because the first night’s set also included: Walk Away, Clay, Pandemonium, Savage Heart, Back to Back (!!!), and in the obligatory encore they also played Rock the House and Please Don’t Leave Me (surprisingly, Red, Hot & Heavy was only played in the set the next day). If we add the following day, 11/18/2020 [sic], when the second half of the concert was made up of absolute rarities and songs picked for the set by the band’s fans, the loss is that much bigger. If times were better for hard rock and heavy metal, this release should have contained at least three CDs and two DVDs.
Listening to this document, it’s a genuine revelation, especially if you haven’t spun the “Future World” album in a long while (ten or fifteen years or more), how this album is still so compositionally strong. How superbly balanced it is, and how, in all its variety of ideas, it grabs the listener and keeps hold of them. The band met with loud, fanatical support, and there was no doubt about that (Japan just has its charms). The band had a blast. Performance-wise. Given that Ronnie Atkins’ voice has of course frayed a little with the years, especially the transition from the middle to the higher register giving him trouble (e.g. Little Drops Of Heaven), the rest of the crew bail him out pretty well with backing vocals, Chris Laney most of all. Anyway, for his age Ronnie sang this concert quite decently. His voice served him very well, he caught a good day, and with it he got through the vocals satisfactorily. At the start of the show, before it launches into the album’s title track, the band tacked on a pre-recorded overture, an orchestrally arranged piece built on the leading phrases of the song Future World. Just listening to this intro, you can quickly feel the adrenaline rush slowly building in the venue.
Fans of the band will welcome this document with open arms. Why? First of all, those who were lucky enough to catch the band playing the whole album live will want to have a (tangible) keepsake. And for everyone else who happened to miss it, they simply must have this document because the band officially stated that they will never again perform the “Future World” album for the rest of their career. In its entirety, of course. Even though a nice chunk of the performed set has been trimmed away, the fans will adopt it right away. No doubt about it. Performance- and production-wise, Pretty Maids remain, even in their later years, an absolute constant that never lets you down.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list on CD / DVD / Blu-ray formats:
CD:
1. Fw30 (Intro)
2. Future World
3. We Came To Rock
4. Love Games
5. Yellow Rain
6. Loud ´N´proud
7. Rodeo
8. Needles In The Dark
9. Eye Of The Storm
10. Long Way To Go
11. Mother Of All Lies
12. Kingmaker
13. Bull’s Eye
14. Little Drops Of Heaven
15. Sin-Decade
DVD and Blu-Ray:
– song videos:
+Little Drops Of Heaven
+Mother Of All Lies
+Nuclear Boomerang
+My Soul To Take
+A Heart Without A Home
+Kingmaker
+Face The World
+Bull’s Eye
+Last Beauty On Earth
+Serpentine
+Will You Still Kiss Me (When I See You In Heaven)
– documentary film from the appearance in Balingen, Germany (Bang Your Head!!! festival, 07/13/2018)
– documentary film from Japan
