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Arena - Caught In The Act CD (album) cover

CAUGHT IN THE ACT

Arena

 

Neo-Prog

4.01 | 59 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

ZowieZiggy
Prog Reviewer
4 stars This DVD consist of the whole of their "Live & Life" CD released a year later than this one.

Tracklist is exactly the same. Usually, DVD's have some addtitional songs featured but it won't be the case here. I had to watch this DVD through my DVD player and standard telly, and I had problems with the sound (I had to put it real high to be able to listen to it). During almost the whole lenght of the DVD, you can hardly hear the audience reactions. I guess that there is definitively a technical problem there.

I have already enjoyed an Arena concert (in 2005 for their "Pepper & Ghost" tour). These are great moments because the band is really skilled and plays back their songs very faithfully. They are energetic and Rob is a relatively good entertainer. For the details of the music, you can have a look at my review of the double CD set "Live & Life".

I will just outline here the additional features you can get out of this DVD. I won't be long over the "fully animated menus", bio, photo gallery etc. These are unfortunately always weak moments on a DVD. I would like bands to be a bit more creative in this respect. Being the owner of a (small) multimedia company, I know that this could be easily improved.

I will highlight here some of the interview parts. I really believe that the interviewer should be fired. Asking such stupid questions is really unbelievable.What's more is that the band not only answered to them, but left them as such on this DVD.

I'll give two examples.

1. Interviewer ask them about the concept of their first album "Songs From The Lions Cage". Both CLive and Mick will tell him that it was no concept, just a collection of songs.

2. The stupid guy will ask them the difference between hard rock and progressive rock. Great discussion !

The interesting moments of this interview will be the origin of the band (while Clive and Mike met and wrote the first few songs with some pints in front of them). You'll also learn that Mick's introduction to music were Deep Purple, Led Zep, Black Sabbath (end of the sixties and the very begining of the seventies) and sometime later Yes, Tull and Genesis. I found this quite remarkable because it corresponds almost to what I have experienced (even if Mick is ... three years older as I am). As far as Clive is concerned, you will learn that he was rather into classical music and that he only discovered prog with "Seconds Out".

I can only recommend this one better than the double CD "Live & Life". You'll get the same track list but at least you will be able to see the band (even if there are little visual features). On top of that, this DVD seems to be lot cheaper than the CD so...

Fours stars.

ZowieZiggy | 4/5 |

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