Lucifer’s Friend
Live @ Sweden Rock 2015

Some ridiculous presenter opens this album by telling of an international DVD in a dialect that makes you feel like you want to cram something into the guy’s mouth just to make him shut up. After the rubbish words the games begin, and it begins on the stage of The Jurassic Park with a band brought back to live by the scientist using DNA from mosquitoes and completing the strands with frog DNA and bingo: the band is brought back to life. And it is keeping with the tradition of using the bigger stages and better stage times for bands well past their prime on that festival, Motörhead next year perhaps? Anyway, lets skip the festival’s love for has-been and focus on this has-been who are looking to be relevant again planning a new album for 2016, a year they start with this live album and DVD.

I have not seen the DVD but the sound quality of the music recording is very good, the band sounds like they were just cloned back to life following their demise long ago. Stylewise they are not dissimilar to bands like Uriah Heep (where we once heard John Lawton sing), Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Little darkish, doomish, progressive hardrock. John Lawton sings really well on this album, the park visitor cheer their dinosaurs and I think it sounds like a very good time. The show seems to have been little over the hour and overall the recording is of high quality with strong song material, they seem to have been doing quite well.

I think that it is good, pretty entertaining overall. Reservations however for the many times where the vocalist talk way too much, it slows down the tempo of the show and I find myself wanting less talk and more consistent energy and not the many interruptions we get – you don’t need to present every song even though you have been absent for many eons. In the end it feels like this production mainly targets the band’s fans, they will most likely be very pleased with what they get as it presses the right buttons, the band does well and all seems very fine – reservations for the video quality if you look at the DVD though. Maybe I do not want to recommend the album as such but it might be well worth looking into if you consider yourself a fan of Lucifer’s Friend.

To me this is a while of good entertainment, but I will probably not return to this album as there are many better things to listen to out there – the recent Uriah Heep compilation to name just one that comes to mind. But maybe my word cannot be helt completely true as I am not really that much of a fan of live album and less so of live albums with a vocalist who talk too much. Fans will rejoice, Lucifer’s Friend is back and they seem to be very strong, I on the other hand will move on and have almost forgotten this one already.

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