LIVE IN MONTRÉAL // FRIDAY

By 2009, the "Friday Night Live" feature at the Marillion Weekend conventions - at which the band would perform an entire album from their back catalogue from start to finish - had become a time-honoured tradition, and the band kept it up with this energetic and boisterous rendition of the Seasons End album. I think Seasons End lends itself better to being played from start to finish in this manner, mainly because every single track on the album is a really neat live track - and the band clearly love each of them, as do the audience. (Check out, for instance, the wonderful sing-along on Easter.)

The performance also included the two great B-sides from this era (The Bell In the Sea and The Release), and on the second disc there's also the encore of tracks from Happiness Is the Road - presumably the band did that because the other two show concepts for the 2009 convention didn't include many Happiness songs and they wanted to give the convention attendees a chance to hear a decent number of tracks from the still-new album.

If you saw my review of Seasons End Live you might have deja vu at this point, and you'd be right to - the Montreal Marillion Weekend was one of a set they did in 2009, so this performance is the exact same set as was performed on Seasons End Live, the only difference between the two being two weeks and a transatlantic flight! On the whole, there's little to choose between the two albums. I would say I think the renditions of material from Happiness Is the Road are a bit better on this one than on the other, possibly because H's voice seems to be in better form this time around - that said, the mix on this one seems to have more intrusive audience noise than on the other. Save getting both for if you're a hopeless completist or a very keen fan of the Seasons End album.