Sieges Even and Dead Soul Tribe
De Bosuil, Weert, The Netherlands
7 January 2006

“The Art of navigating with the Stars” is one of my favorite prog rock records of 2005 and now was the chance to see this amazing band live together with Dead Soul Tribe. Eight years after “retiring” from the music scene, cult prog band Sieges Even made a comeback with one of their best records ever. The band has a new singer, a Dutch guy from Rotterdam called Arno Menses and his voice made the music of SE even better. On this night the band played for almost 1,5 hours and the set was an entire list of musical prog rock highlights. Especially the amazing songs from their last album like “The Weight” (sheer magic), “Styx”; “To the ones who have Failed” and “Stigmata” sounded like they came directly from prog heaven… Vocalist Menses was out of this world and guitar player Markus Steffen did things on his guitar, which I have almost never witnessed. Older material from albums like “Life Cycle”(1988) and “A Sense Of Change’ also did rather well on this night, especially “Life Cycle” was very “aggressive”, but still also very melodic. The very dry, almost English humor, of Menses, did the rest and made this gig a very special one. I could have listened to this band for a couple of hours more...

Unfortunately SE had to leave the stage for Dead Soul Tribe, the band around Devon Graves. As I really did not like their last CD “The Dead Word” I was wondering how this gig would turn out. The last time I heard DST alive was with Threshold in the same venue and DST disappointed me then already to a great extend. This time however it was even worse, all the songs sounded alike and in my opinion the volume was way up too high. Ofcourse Graves did the best he could, but for me that was not enough. It all sounded very dark, doomy and gloomy and there were almost no solos whatsoever, just the same guitar riffs over and over again. And when Graves started to play the flute I could not help thinking about Jethro Tull, a band that I also never liked or could appreciate. A lot of people seemed to enjoy themselves, so maybe my opinion is not that relevant, at least it is very subjective, but we all know that there is no account for (good) taste, so...

Report by Martien Koolen, martien [at] rockunited.com
Pictures by Augie Rothkrantz
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