10TH ANNIVERSARY CONCERT (DVD)

After the relatively disappointment of the Storyteller DVD, Lane and Erick Norlander seemed to realise their mistake and quickly release a "proper" live DVD in the following year, the 10th Anniversary Concert. This time they provided a real good multi-camera view and songs from the same show (or, at least, from shows from the same tour, unlike the previous Storyteller). The result is everything one fan waited for a long time: the sensation of "being there", watching the whole performance of the same band members. This time they also got the right musicians too and avoided the big confusion that had to be fixed on studio for various takes on Storyteller. Now, besides her husband and keyboardist extraordinaire Erick Norlander, she has a new rhythm section of Pain Of Salvation bassist Christopher Gildenlow and drummer Ernst Van Ee. Lead guitarist Neil Citron unfortunately is not around, but Peer Vershuren does a fine job anyway. Most important is the return of Mark McCrite on second guitar and harmony vocals. His voice simply blends perfectly with Lanes and does a much better job than Kelly Keeling did on the previous tour.

The only problem with the 10th anniversary Concert if the fact that they tried, as much as possible, to avoid playing the same songs they performed on Storyteller. And since that included most of their classics, the set list here suffers, even if the quality of the delivering is way better than before. Her most famous song Symphony of Angels gets a the stunning visual it deserved, but many other live favourites do not. Great stuff like Through The Rain, Night Falls, Frankenstein Unbound or Escher´s Staircase, just to name but a few, which did not get the right visual or the best performance on Storyteller, are missing. Not that the actual repertoire is bad, far from it, but I guess the title implies a compilation of sorts and most we get are album tracks and more recent material.

Still, I must say I like this DVD a lot: after all, is a whole concert, the quality of the the sound is top notch (as anything with Norlander´s stamp on it) , Lane is a great singer and is in top form here. The band is tight and the songs, if not the ones we would love to see and hear, are very good: I specially like how Lane gives room to the musicians to shine and deliver great instrumental passages, making it sound like a band effort rather than a solo performance backed by excellent bunch. It seems that we´ll have to wait some more time until we get a good live recording of a show that may include her classics together with the newer stuff. But for now this 10th Anniversary Concert will do.

Rating: somewhere between 3,5 and 4 stars, that I´ll round up to four because of it´s a great show regardless of the missing classics.