BRAVE LIVE 2013

Brave is a Marillion album with a truly unique atmosphere, feeling like a piece apart from the rest of their discography. Their very best live performances of the entire album recapture that atmosphere. Brave Live 2013 doesn't. Possibly this is down to this performance of the album feeling less like the welcome return of a long-lost old friend that the first Brave Live was, so much as it feels a bit more like business as usual. (It doesn't help that there's still a brace of H-era studio albums that haven't been given the Marillion Weekend treatment - marillion.com, Somewhere Else, Happiness Is the Road.)

The value of this set is upped slightly by a brace of songs on the encore, though the chosen songs don't seem to have much rhyme or reason to them (constrained, perhaps, by the other show concepts for the Marillion Weekend in question). Perhaps a better idea would be to try and find songs elsewhere in the Marillion catalogue which could smoothly slip into the Brave story to provide a sort of "Even Braver" setlist; as it stands, this feels like an exercise in going through some well-oiled but rather old motions.