Haken
L-1VE

Haken from The United Kingdom releases the first live album in the career that spans for little over a decade now. They have given it a strange name and it comes as a live album on two CDs and two DVDs where the second disk contains a few songs from Prog Power and some official videos and the first one contains the show. The show was recorded in Amsterdam in April 2013 and now it sees the light of day as a nice live package from this band that we have reviewed three times already and their 2013 release called Mountain received a rating of five, the others four. So it is a solid progressive rock/metal band we are taking on now, so lets see what they have on offer. For one thing they have a pretty nice artwork that would have been great for a vinyl LP release.

A progressive rock/metal live album, the songs are a little rawer and perhaps slightly more powerful in the live format than on the studio releases. They are not as polished as on the studio, but they perform their songs well and have a pretty fine sound nevertheless – I think that it is a pretty strong live production. The songs are taken from their entire discography with some emphasis on the latest two albums but they do some long stuff from earlier works as well so the Haken fan gets the whole essence of the band I guess. And the songs merge together well, almost like they were all from the same album. Relatively varied feel but the album can tend to feel slightly on the long side, especially if you watch the video.

Kind of a feeling of being let down when watching the video after having played the music in the portable music player for a while, I don’t think the quality of the video match the quality of the music. It is not a gigantic letdown but watching the show feels quite static, the cutting and filming gets quite repetitive and predictable. The small stage makes the band a bit static in their performance so the visual tricks like the filming angles, cutting and moving cameras should attempt to compensate for this. I think having a drone filming the band and audience from above at sealing level while moving around would have been a nice addition and the cameras should move or zoom all the time to compensate for the static appearance of the band that probably is due to the small stage they play on. More audience would have been nice as well.

Entertaining music with not so entertaining visuals, there are some nice tricks with out of focus and angles every now and then but not enough. They should have dared more in the visual department. The music is another matter as that is strong and probably betters several of their albums even; I think they do really well in that department. The Aquarius medley called Aquamedley that covers most of their debut album is a great track; all the tracks are of high quality I think. But none of the tracks is even near to Cockroach King that I wrote about even when I reviewed Mountain back in 2013, that track is brilliant also in live version.

Not the most brilliant of live efforts but probably more than good enough to entertain and please the fans. Clearly recommended for the fans, I on the other hand still prefer Mountain and suggest that it is a better choice if you are looking to know more about Haken and their music. L-1VE is a solid live album, and that is not really that unexpected considering what they have done before.

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