LIVE 1975 AT Q.P.R. VOL. 1

I felt lucky when I found this at the record store. This dvd is a registration of a stadium tour of 1975. To my opinion the band was at its peak of musical creativity during this time. While retaining its sound the band broke their musical boundaries on their 1974 album Relayer. I always find there's some resemblance between the music of Relayer and Close to the edge. Apart from the 3 track format, the songs are rather accessible and contain many memorable melodies but Relayer goes on where "Close" stops. The jazz influence is noticeable on "Sound chaser" , the most adventurous track the band ever conceived. The track listing on this dvd contains the 3 tracks from Relayer and also a version of "Close to the edge" which sounds very close to the original. While "sound chaser" and "to be over" are excellent tracks, they never became concert classics so there's not much opportunity to catch a live performance on video. The stage show that they used was exceptionable. Yes used stage attributes to capture the atmosphere of the Roger Dean cover art. The camera work on this registration is perfect, the screen quality of the movie is top notch, hard to believe these images are more than 20 years old, although it becomes believable when realising how young the members of the band look on this DVD. There's plenty of close-ups of all members. A bit funny to see a bearded Jon Anderson. This is the first part of the concert. I suppose you can find the the rest of the gig on volume 2 if such thing has been released in the dvd format yet. Too bad most of these recordings have been made in the daylight. I suppose it must be more exciting too see the show in the dark when the stage lights are coming through properly. The bad sound quality on this dvd spoils a lot. There's something terribly wrong with the mixing of the instruments. On most of these performances the sound of the keyboards overshadows all of the other instruments. Most of the time for example you see Steve Howe playing very enthusiast without actually hearing his guitar parts coming though as it shoulds. Same thing could be said about the drums, the percussion work looks extremely interesting too bad you can't hear what's it like. For what I can hear of the Relayer tracks sounds pretty decent but in these circumstances you can't really tell. This dvd only stimulates my longing for decent live recordings of this tour. Still a must have for the fans