SUNRISE FESTIVAL

WOW! I was a little hesitant about picking this album as the previous official live releases of the band were dissapointed me, especially Live @ The Pongmasters Ball. However, if someone who familiar with the history of this band takes a look at the tracklist and the lineup of the Sunrise Festival performance, he'll find a suprising fact that the songs what's played belong to a certain period of the band - a legendary period when albums like 'Erpland' or 'Pungent Effulgent' were born... And what a suprise again, the lineup contains two key creative members of that period, Merv Pepler and Joie Hinton. They both left the band in the mid 90's which resulted a considerable change of the style and sound of the band that time. While Pepler appeared in some songs of the recent OT albums, having Hinton back in the band again is a completly new thing (for me). The result is mindblowing to say the least. Mixing is great this time, drums sound fantastic and there's a terrific bass playing through all the performance. And Ed's guitar... honestly it really sounds like if we were in the 80's... exceptional! The only miss is the absence of the usual flutist which could make the sound richer - on the contrary, without the flute the performance is even more like the way the band sounded in the mid 80's: mixture of long heavy solos in the unique style of Ed Wynne along with those weird psychedelic keyboard effects the way that can be heard only on early bootlegs. The performance starts with a nice intro track named from the artist who usually creates the cover art for the albums. The essential part of this release comes right next : probably this is one of the best live performance ever of O-I, Vita Voom and Jurassic Shift. Sunrise Jam is not the usual jam of early songs OT used to play in their past gigs. It sounds more like the last studio album, especially like the song 'Spacebase' with some Waterfall Cities like synth loops here and there. The rest of the songs are more or less in the same high quality (with the exception of 'Snakepit' which is a pretty average song - I've never seen why they play it live so often). This live album is recommended for both the old fans and newcomers or for those who familiar with only the recent releases of the band. Its time to explore/relive how they sounded in their golden age. 4,5 stars, a musthave album.