BURIED ALIVE

The early-to-mid 1990s saw a new resurgence of progressive rock music. Part of this can be put down to the rise of the Internet making it easier for enthusiasts to find each other and to discuss the music they loved; part of this was down to the rise of new acts intent on recapturing more complex sounds of yesteryear and not satisfied with the concessions to commerciality that the neo-prog groups had worked into their music; part of this was down to new prog-oriented festivals being arranged to provide showcases for the music.

And of course much of it came about because of all those three being interlinked. The Internet helped fans discover bands and festivals that they'd have never heard of otherwise, international promotion now being viable on a DIY basis whereas before only the biggest acts could have dreamed of it. The new bands looked to the Internet and festivals to develop an audience for their music. The festivals found in the new bands a generation of enthusiastic, hungry acts producing great music and keen to put them before an audience, and found in the Internet a sufficient audience to make staging the festivals in question viable.

In that respect, Buried Alive is an album which offers a microcosm of the burgeoning prog renaissance of the 1990s - for it's a live album from Änglagård, one of the most exciting new acts of the era, capturing their performance at the 1994 ProgFest in the USA. In former years, the idea of a Swedish band who had only put out one album on a more or less self-released basis getting to play a US music festival would have been far-fetched indeed - but Änglagård were one of the early darlings of the online prog fanbase, and that made them a natural fit for ProgFest.

What you get here consists of all of their debut album, Hybris, plus a brace of three tracks from Epilog, which had been recorded a few months prior. They are delivered largely as you remember them from the studio albums, bar for the odd difference in audio and delivery to be expected from the live context. If you love Änglagård and cannot get enough of them, that'll be fine - and if you're a symphonic prog fan that's probably the case. At the same time, I'd not recommend this over their studio releases.