EYES IN THE NIGHT (THE RECORDINGS 1981 - 1986)

This expansive boxed set from Esoteric brings together on CD freshly spruced-up presentations of essentially everything that Palllas put out during the 1980s. The title is a bit of a misnomer - nothing on this box was recorded after 1985, the Wedge album having been held up for a while and then released with a total lack of publicity. (The included booklet has a hilarious anecdote about how the band appeared at an HMV store to promote the album - the chain being owned by EMI at the time - only for interested customers to discover that they didn't have it in stock, prompting them to go to the rival Virgin Megastore to buy it!) It's also worth noting that this doesn't include the band's absolutely earliest recorded work, the Pallas EP from the late 1970s - but the band have essentially disowned it.

Still, this is arguably Pallas at the moment they made their biggest cultural splash - a moment in the sun which they'd hoped would lead to the sort of success enjoyed by Marillion, their sometimes-rivals sometimes-comrades in the early days, but which was squandered, leading to a long hiatus until 1998's Beat the Drum. First up is their self-released live album Arrive Alive - finally issued on CD in its original running order, with none of the live tracks swapped out for studio demos! (The Arrive Alive single, the source of some of said demos, is appended as bonus tracks.) Having heard prior CD reissues of Arrive Alive, I can say that the album sounds better than it ever has - the original masters having, astonishingly, been unearthed after all this time to give the album a much-needed spring cleaning.

Naturally, you also get The Sentinel in here - in fact, two versions of it, one with the original UK mix and one with the updated mix released in the US. Both discs follow the original running order, with the UK mix disc including all of the Atlantis-related tracks cut from the original album and relegated to B-sides (along with Crown of Thorns, a lynchpin of early live shows) - presumably different mixes for the US were never prepared for those cuts.

The decision to restore the old running order takes a little fiddling if you want to listen to the Atlantis Suite in a rough approximation of its intended order, but playlists and programmable CD players make that easy these days, right? For my money, I find the most satisfactory order being starting off with the poppier, self-contained numbers (Shock Treatment, Cut and Run, and Eyes In the Night), moving on to Crown of Thorns as a palette-cleanser to ease into the proggier tracks, and then an Atlantis Suite running order of Rise and Fall, East West, March On Atlantis, Heart Attack, Atlantis, and Ark of Infinity.

Much fun and good-natured debate will surely be had as other listeners tweak their running orders - and bicker over which of the US and UK mixes they prefer - the band prefer the punchier US mix, but I actually like the gentler UK one somewhat better. With the box providing you all of the Sentinel-era studio recordings (with alternate mixes where those exist), it gives you everything you need to come to your own conclusions.

The band's first Alan Reed-fronted album - the aforementioned Wedge - is included, and as bonus tracks you also get the Knightmoves EP, including two demo tracks (Mad Machine and A Stitch In Time) released as a 7" bonus single with the original release of Knightmoves. On top of that, the included Blu-Ray offers both original singer Euan Lowson and Alan in action - Alan gets the lion's share of it in the form of the Live From London performance (originally broadcast on the same TV show which recorded memorable gigs by Twelfth Night and IQ), whilst the Eyes In the Night music video captures Euan mere months before he'd be cut from the band.

Both the Euan-fronted and Alan-fronted versions of the band have more to offer here, however! The "At the BBC and More" disc includes the Paris Is Burning single and B-side (The Hammer Falls) from early 1983, the band's triumphant 1983 set at the Reading Festival (from right before they jetted off to record The Sentinel with Eddy Offord), and a BBC session from early 1984 to promote The Sentinel. Taken all together, this offers an alternate spin on the band as they existed at the time of The Sentinel, with familiar material often given a punchier spin than attained on The Sentinel itself (in either mix).

On the Alan Reed side of the coin, the final CD here is a live show from Ritzy's in Aberdeen in late 1985 - chronologically it's the last material in this boxed set to be recorded, and it finds the band continuing the process they'd begun on Knightmoves and The Wedge of reconciling their commercially-inclined side (always a factor, as the Arrive Alive single demonstrates) and their proggier instincts. It's decent, and a nice chance to hear live cuts from The Wedge from shortly after the album was recorded... but maybe I detect a touch of weariness in the performance.

I could be wrong - maybe I'm just being influenced by knowing what was to come for the band. But it's hard not to listen to the band trying their best in a comparatively small venue here and not be reminded that, simultaneously, Marillion were conquering he world with Misplaced Childhood. Pallas had the next-best run with the major labels after Marillion of any of the early neo-prog bands; remember that it only took one major label release to derail Twelfth Night, Pendragon and IQ were only ever signed to arm's-length satellite labels with distribution deals rather than signing to a major label proper, and Solstice flat-out ignored the mainstream music industry altogether.

And yet where Marillion had thrived, Pallas floundered. This boxed set aptly demonstrates that this was not due to inherent shortcomings in their music as such - they might have never put out a true five-star classic in the 1980s, but there's potential here which, nourished sympathetically, could have flowered into something wonderful.