ARRIVE ALIVE

This 1981 live album was Pallas' very first release. It is rather unusual for a band to release a live album before having released a studio album first, but it would take Pallas another three years until their studio debut and, at least in my opinion, it wasn't until the late 90's and early 2000's that they reached their musical peak. Pallas is thus a band that needed a very long time to mature musically and the present album is clearly an immature effort. Indeed, there is not much here to indicate the direction the band would later take and only the title track from Arrive Alive survived for the studio debut. Indeed, as far as I know, none of the other songs ever existed in studio form.

A few of the other songs here have been played live by the band in recent times though and The Ripper, Crown Of Thorns and Queen Of The Deep have all been featured on other, more recent, live releases - the former two songs were featured on the 2003 live DVD The Blinding Darkness and the third on the 2009 live album Moment To Moment. These songs stood out on those releases as being inferior to the band's newer material, but comparing the new recordings with these from 1981, it becomes clear that they needed an update. And not only in terms of sound quality!

Pallas had not yet found their direction at this point and the Pallas of Arrive Alive has indeed little to do with the Pallas of Beat The Drum, The Cross And The Crucible and The Dreams Of Men, or, for that matter, the Pallas of The Sentinel. They seem unsure here whether they wanted to be a Prog band or a Punk band! Looking back, we can confirm that they thankfully opted for Prog and the rest is history. Well, I might have been exaggerating a bit with the Punk insinuation; several of the songs are actually, after all, around ten minutes in length and quite ambitious, but the execution is rather rough and the end product a bit raw.

I can recommend this album only for fans and collectors of the band as well as to those with a special interest in the early history of British Neo-Prog or "Proto-Neo-Prog" as one might perhaps call this.

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