LIVEDELICA

This live release - originally put out as a standalone before being collected on recent 2CD editions of Psychedelicatessen - captures Threshold in the midst of a European tour in early 1995. There's only five tracks here, drawn from their first two albums, but given that this is prog metal you do still get a decent amount of music; the running time is a shade over 41 minutes, and given that they were in a support slot for the shows in question this is probably an accurate representation of what you'd have got at those shows.

Glynn Morgan is on vocals here - he was about to depart again, prompting a brief return for Damian Wilson - but to my ears he seems to have improved notably. Don't get me wrong, his vocals on Psychedelicatessen were fine, but they were only fine - they were perfectly acceptable generic vocals which didn't seem to have much in the way of distinctive character. He's a bit less stiff here, and that's to the benefit both of his performance and to the music as a whole - I can better understand what the band saw in him at the time, and why they'd welcome him back to the fold more recently. After this, he'd depart to form Mindfeed, and I can see why he'd opt to take a bet on himself on the strength of his work here.

As for the band themselves, they're giving the songs here an energetic workthrough which really showcases their capabilities in a live context. Jay Micciche's drumming is a bit uninspiring - Jay would leave to join Mindfeed after this - but perhaps that's inevitable given that Threshold seemed to have trouble finding a drummer who really gelled with the group in their early years. (To give you an idea, Johanne James has been the group's drummer for every release since Hypothetical in 2001; prior to him they had four different drummers, only one of whom actually appeared on two consecutive studio releases!) One could easily chalk up Micciche's playing to needing to catch up with a complex back catalogue of material in a hurry after the departure of Nick Harradence, so I don't mean any great criticism of Micciche by this, and it's certainly not enough to stop this being a compelling live release.