After Midnight Live

Alright, with the amount of dickriding I do for this band, the score I gave may be a surprise. I’ve tried really god damn hard to get myself to like this but I just can’t. This is a live radio broadcast recorded in 1979, and shows off more of the Mark of the Beast/Invasion style of song that the Road started with, a more relaxed space rock type of sound. After listening to probably their heaviest album a bunch for my last review, this was a bit of a shock to the system, and I probably should have done this review earlier in my run so the flow wouldn’t have been broken. Oh well.

After Midnight Live is like the discard pile of early Manilla Road, the songs that never got to print before and are all on this one radio broadcast. I'm very sure Mark was on something while he was performing this, as he has a few strange moments throughout. For example, in the song Chromaphobia, part of the second verse just kinda fades. It's very strange and I think it's because he just forgot the lyrics to his song. I do like the song as a whole, it's probably my favourite on the record but I just wish there was a better version of it to listen to. The overall mixing here is quite decent for such an old recording, I really like this guitar tone, more than the one on Mark of the Beast personally.

An issue I take with pretty much every track here is how they don't really make use of their run time. Life's So Hard, for example, doesn't just go on the same melody for the whole 12 minutes, but the variance is so spread out and each section is so long that I find it just droning. The exception here is Herman Hill, in my opinion the noodling is cool enough and it keeps upbeat for long enough that I can really enjoy this one. Of the middle 3 songs, Pentacle of Truth and Dream of Peace are okay as well but they bear a lot of resemblance to songs that would later be on Mark of the Beast (Black Lotus and Court of Avalon in particular), so I don't find myself getting too into them.

One fun thing about this is we get to see the little moments of interaction between the radio host and Mark. This is just a nice little bit of flavour that makes listening to the whole thing a little more enjoyable. For those of you who like really organic and kinda cozy, intimate live albums, or just albums in general since it could pass as a studio album, I would check it out. Personally, though, I get bored with it really damn easily and struggle to sit through even one song. They hadn’t yet found their epic long song formula and this just isn’t my cup of tea. I’d still recommend it to people who enjoyed Invasion and Mark of the Beast and want more of the same kind of stuff, but I’m not really too excited about this. I’m just glad to get it out of the way so I can talk about the badassery that Shark got up to in the 2010s.