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Symphony X - Live on the Edge of Forever  CD (album) cover

LIVE ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER

Symphony X

 

Progressive Metal

3.80 | 79 ratings

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King of Loss
Prog Reviewer
3 stars This is Symphony X's first live album and it features 15 songs (actually 16 songs considering the split song Candlelight Fantasia/Death Of Balance).

The 1st of the 2cd set features most of the concept album "V" (Tracks 1-8, and parts of track 9), part of the amazingly beautiful Candlelight Fantasia and Eye of Medusa. The live version of V is done with an almost flawless execution of vocals done by the great Russell Allen, the guitar solos are almost played to perfection by neo-Classical guitar virtuoso Michael Romeo. The part I do not like about this live album is the lack of keyboards on songs like Fallen and Candlelight Fantasia. If the other instruments had overpowered something, they definitely overpowered Michael Pinnella's extremely tasteful keyboard playing here. Overall, the first disc is a good live version of the songs shown here, with the exception of Russell's superb live vocals and Pinnella's unhearable keyboards. 4/5

The 2nd part of the 2cd set features a bunch of songs, mostly prominently the more "famous older songs". I was hoping for "Edge of Forever", but its not on here.

What is on here is:

Smoke And Mirrors- A song with a killer keyboard intro that goes downhill, Sym X sound almost the same live, so it doesn't really matter 3/5

Church of the Machine- Perhaps one of my favorite Sym X songs, it features a great riff and beautiful choral singings by Russ 5/5

Through the Looking Glass- This live version is not quite as good as the album version because I still CAN NOT HEAR MICHAEL'S KEYBOARDS VERY WELL! 3.5/5

And of course the rest of the songs almost sound similar as compared to the others minus Michael Pinnela and Russell Allen's superb vocals. In the end, the keyboards completely destroy the quality of this live album. It is a not bad live album, but could be 100 times better. SInce this is the only Sym X live album, for fans of Sym X like me, we have no choice. Hopefully a new live dvd will be recorded soon.

3.5/5

King of Loss | 3/5 |

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