12:5

12:5 is a live album were the band play reworked acoustic versions of many of their songs from their first four albums (Entropia to Remedy Lane). In-fact its more than that. This is an album with a few stand alone tracks in the middle of the album book-ended by a couple of 20 minute "epics" created by a few of Pain of Salvations shorter tracks and a few all new composed sections making up the songs. The result is an incredible live album that never once gets boring at any point in its 60 minutes, whenever its played.

The strength of this album is not just in the performance of the songs but the way they are performed, with several of them being completely reworked. For instance, Leaving Entropia, the short closing track to the debut album is the opener to this live album and is impressively fleshed out with all the band playing and stretched to double its original length whilst still maintaining some really interesting, and breathtaking playing. This is maintained throughout the album with pieces that you will recognize from elsewhere appearing here, like the opening section of Idioglossia opening Brickwork Part II and the Star Wars theme in the middle of Reconciliation.

Some of the songs performed here do tend to raise an eyebrow when you look over the track listings; Oblivion Ocean, Reconciliation, Dryad Of The Woods, Leaving Entropia, these are not the songs that you would have expected a band with such a strong back catalogue of songs to pick, but they surprise you in how good they sound here in an acoustic setting. Several of the songs, namely Dryad Of The Woods, Oblivion Ocean and Reconciliation, are better here as acoustic tracks than they are on the albums they come from with no more than a little re-arranging and played with acoustic instruments rather than electric.

This album is brilliant, I have tried hard and cant really find any faults with it at all. The separation into three sections (Genesis, Genesister, Genesinister) and the respective arrangements make it feel like a proper album with all the songs working together, and as I've said I prefer some of the songs here to their electric counterparts. The track listing may not be to every bodies liking but then, when is it ever on a live album? I urge everyone to at least listen to this album once, even if you aren't a fan of metal, this works brilliantly and fully deserves its 5 stars.