BURIED ALIVE

Let's spend five minutes to review the posthumous release of the Swedish band Änglagärd. As you all know, the band unfortunately only released two albums, those being Hybris and Epilog, while the French based Musea label released the highlights of Progfest '94 on a double CD including Änglagärd favourite "Hostsejd" ("Rite Of Fall"). The band's performance on that memorable 5th November '94 finally became their very last gig together, so afterwards they thought it might be nice to put the entire concert on disc. In the beginning, the band and Musea thought of releasing this as a double CD, featuring the entire concert plus an unreleased composition of around 15 minutes.

Around that time, some of the Änglagärd members were active in the band Pineforest Crunch and it looked as if that unreleased 15-minute track would be used for this band. Due to this fact, the record company no longer found it interesting to release 2 CDs, so it was decided to limit the live recording to a single release. Buried Alive (Levande Begravd) includes all of the Hybrid album plus two tracks from Epilog, which means that the early fans are left a little in the dark. As "Hostsejd" has already been included on the Progfest '94 album it was decided to omit it from the Buried Alive album.

Sometimes the sound sits way in the back, such as the piano in "Jordrök'. When you turn up the volume, the bass bangs out of your speakers whilst the next passage is again too silent. The group themselves admit that this was one of their worst concerts ever because of the many mistakes they made. Meanwhile drummer Mattias Olsson and keyboard player Thomas Johnsson played in the Swedish version of Jesus Christ Superstar. The pair also got involved in the Krake-project where they played music in the vein of Swedish jazz pianist Jan Johansson. Guitarist Jonas Engdegard worked as an engineer for local bands in Stockholm. Flutist Anna Holmgren studied music in Katrineholm. Bass player Johan Högberg worked part-time at a record shop, whilst guitarist Tord Lindman went to India for four months and then went on to work for a Swedish ferry company.

Mattias Olsson became a member of Pineforest Crunch, whose debut album Make Believe sold in excess of 50,000 copies in Sweden alone, bringing them enough acclaim to be billed at the world famous Roskilde festival (remember the people killed during the Pearl Jam concert there in 2000?!). Mattias went on to record Ex Tenebris with White Willow from Norway. Then there's also his side project Reminders, for which he was finishing a demo featuring seven semi-acoustic songs reminiscent of American Music Club, Tom Petty with a dash of R.E.M. The most important activity was the recording of the second Pineforest Crunch album with the working title of Marrakesh. The band was looking for the ideal producers, having been declined by King Crimson producer David Bottrill. This means that Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and Mitchell Froom were still in the cards. Pineforest Crunch also added the sound of a real Mellotron, which means the new material can be found in the region of Pink Floyd, almost country-styled popsongs and ambient sounding Camel-like tunes.