PROG PÅ SVENSKA - LIVE IN JAPAN

Fairly solid latter-day Anglagard live album. Once you get past the opener "Introvertus Fugu (Den asociala blåsfisken) Part 1", the album borders on the formulaic - you get two tracks from each of their studio albums and that's your lot. Long- term fans will find that there's a significant but not total overlap in track selection between this and Buried Alive - not so much as to render either release redundant, but enough to offer up an interesting exercise in comparing and contrasting how they come across in both contexts.

Infamously, Anglagard weren't keen on the Buried Alive release - they'd disbanded recently after the US festival appearance captured on that live album, in part because they were dissatisfied with how they were realising their studio compositions in live contexts, and they didn't think it was up to scratch. By contrast, this is a much more official live release, representing the band as they would prefer to be heard. I think they were too hard on themselves back in the 1990s and that Buried Alive is a perfectly decent release, but at the same time I would say that this one has the edge on it in terms of recording quality. (It's also simply more interesting to hear the compositions from their 1990s albums reinterpreted with the benefit of two decades of hindsight.)

Whilst I don't think either release is really going to displace the studio originals by my reckoning, I'd certainly recommend this as your next stop if you have already enjoyed Anglagard's studio albums and are desperate for more.