At last! A new live album by Emperor. I've waited for something like this for a long time and sure wasn’t disappointed. The album starts with an intro that sounds like the intro on the “emperor vs. thorns” album - after that it starts with “curse you all men” that’s probably taken from some other show, and after that all the rest of the songs are from the same show. This album features songs from all of the albums, and even old ones like “night of the graveless souls”. Emperor uses 2 more players when they play live ; Charmand Grimloch of Tartaros (if I’m correct) on keyboards , and Tyr on bass. So this way the songs can be played without anything missing, which is quite important for a band that play’s atmospheric music like this. I must say that Emperor performs a very high quality of musicianship and there are only small differences between the original versions of these songs and the live performance (its funny to hear “inno a satana” without the clear vocals), this is a good thing because it shows the band are good in live show situation, but it also take’s away a bit of the live feeling when everything sounds just like in the album. Personally I’m very satisfied with the songs Emperor decided to play on this album - I didn’t think that they'd play songs like “with strength I burn” or “inno a satana” - if it was up to me I’d put more songs from “in the nightside eclipse”. Well, there’s not much more to say. A very good album, high class performance, a must for every Emperor fan and also a good way to introduce this band to people who don’t know them.

By the way , the first track on this CD contains computer data that features a video clip from the show for the song “I am the black wizards” which is very nice, and also two cool Emperor screen-savers (another 2 things that make this CD worth buying).

© 2000 undivine