MADE AGAIN

Made Again is a double live album that contains performances from three different tours. The first six songs are from the Holidays In Eden tour, the second six from the Afraid Of Sunlight tour and the second disc is a complete performance of Brave (guess which tour that's from).

This live album has one big problem with it unfortunately, the production quality is very poor. Steve Hogarth is the only member of the band that you can hear clearly throughout both CD's, with the rhythm section of Pete Trewaves and Ian Mosley being completely lost in the mix. Guitars and keyboards can be heard quite clearly when playing the higher notes but otherwise has a very poor sound quality as well. For a band that have, in recent years at least, taken fan-friendly recordings to the extreme I would have expected a better quality of sound production from them.

Having said that, the only real gripes are that Beautiful, No One Can and Waiting To Happen aren't particularly good songs, their not exactly bad but we all know Marillion can do much better than this. I also found that Hogarth should probably stay away from certain Fish-era classics, in this case namely Kayleigh and Lavender. His style of singing really does not suit these songs (though it might work better with some songs from Clutching At Straws) as he doesn't have the sense of theatrics that Fish does, and its that ability that really does make these songs stand out.

Whether you like the second disc or note really depends on what you made of Brave, I liked the album and I believe that the performance of it here really lives up to the standard of the album, and possibly beats it. For that matter the performances of all the songs are at a very high standard from all five members of the band were no one comes close to dropping the ball. Its just a shame that you have to listen really closely to get this.

Overall this could have been a 4 star live album with only some of the songs on disc one being noticeably poorer than others (mainly the Holidays In Eden songs) and the two Fish-era songs being unsuited to Hogarths voice. However the really awful production on this album reduces my final rating to 3 stars. If you can get round the poor production you could really enjoy this album, but it does take some work for that.