ARRIVE ALIVE

Like their peers Twelfth Night, Pallas foreshadowed their celebrated studio career with a live release in 1981 (well, mostly live - all editions after the initial cassette release fill out the running time with some studio demos).

However, whereas Twelfth Night was a highly instrumental-focused group at the time and would only develop a flair for the theatrical once Geoff Mann became their vocalist, Arrive Alive demonstrates that Pallas took a theatrical, narrative approach to their music from the very start. Queen of the Deep feels like an interesting Rush-Eloy mashup, whilst The Ripper gives vocalist Euan Lowson an opportunity to really flex his storytelling and theatrical muscles.

At the same time, the studio demos reveal another side to Pallas's approach. The conventional wisdom used to have it that Pallas, much like Twelfth Night, were victims of studio meddling when they had their brief flirtation with major label stardom, with the band turning out a number of poppier, more mainstream tracks at the behest of the label. However, the title track here - Arrive Alive - is pretty close in its essentially AOR-pop nature to the version which would later appear on The Sentinel, so it's evident that it wasn't just EMI's influence that had Pallas writing material like that.

Different editions of the album offer different track listings and even different "takes" of the live tracks, some of which sound better than others, but any version of the album will be of great interest to those interested in the early neo-prog scene, particularly since Arrive Alive hails from the point in time when it seems like the sound of Pallas, early Marillion and Twelfth Night were the closest.

The best configuration of the album easily available at this time is probably the one on the Eyes In the Night boxed set from Esoteric, which collects all of Pallas' 1980s output, since this restores the original running order and has all of the live cuts in place, and includes the Arrive Alive single in the band's preferred mix rather than the rough mix.