Line Up: Jeff Scott Soto - Vocals , Marcel Jacob - Bass , Howie Simon and Freddie Åkesson - Guitars, Jamie Borger - Drums

There’s no doubt that Sweden (or maybe we can better say scandinavia) has been one of the countries who deliverd a lot of bands into the musical world during the 80ies, 90ies (let’s take the band Europe for example), Talisman is one of them, and even though I honestly have never heard of this band (Ok, if this is really weird.. blame me! Slap me in the face. But I do know the band Human Clay, which is a side project of Talismen Soto and Jacob) Talisman have already been a band for over 15 years.

There was an idea to record this CD/DVD package was actually an idea of Luk De Roover, who is the promotor for the “Lokeren Feesten”. He wanted the band to play on his festival, and they would receive the beta recordings of it, and on their way to this show the band added some more things, other shows, and old videos. Like a collection from the present and the past.

Let’s review the DVD package, cause the 2CD release is just the audio from DVD 1. The Audio of 2 live shows.

DVD 1
It is kinda funny though that even because of the Lokerse Feesten gig being the reason to publish this set, that that show isn’t on the DVD, well.. not on the first anyway.

On the first DVD we do see 2 shows, these are “Live at Club Mondo Stockholm” and “Live at Sweden Rock Festival”. By clicking in the shiney *cough* menu you can acces these 2 shows among with a little bonus section. But more on that later.

Both shows include songs like “Break Your Chains”, “Colour my XTC”. “Fabricated War”, and “Tears in The Sky”. And there’s a lot of activity on the stage, most of it by singer Jeff Scott Soto who walks up and down the stage, and even jumps around when Fredrik Åkesson plays a standard (just combining some scales) solo. The sound is quite okay, not stunning.. but they don’t need to achieve the quality that most ‘Hollywood rockbands’ have, cause they’re not one. (You can also turn on the subtitles on this DVD to get some sort of a karaoke feeling, invite all your friends and sing along with Talisman!!)

So, let’s head on to the bonus stuff, maybe that’s more interesting. In the bonus section on DVD one, we can choose for 3 songs “Mysterious”, “If You Would Only Be My Friend”, and “Outta My Way”. These 3 songs can be viewed in multiangle, which means that you can toggle between 4 streams, and play the director for yourself. The only irritating about this is, that you see the 4 streams constantly on the left side of your tv window. Let’s see what DVD2 got to offer

DVD 2
Okay a new DVD, and again.. a shiney menu *cough again*. Retrospect and Bonus are the 2 choices you can make here. Retrospect is a ‘movie’ which is a compilation of live footage, video clips, some camcorder look-how-funny-we-are footage

And by clicking on the Bonus section, there are several other things you can choose. “naked bass player” ?? No, I’m not gonna click that one, “Discography” .. er.. we all know what that is, there are also some Credits, and an option call “Shred” *clicketyclick* This brings you to some live footage of the 2 guitar players playing solo to each other like it’s a contest. And you can hear the singer sing a piece from “Stairway to Heaven”. Why in Slayer’s name did he do that?

If you’re a fan of this kind of music. The 80/90ies melodic hard rock stuff, and you like Talisman, then.. yeah why not buy this album, but for the people who have been discovering music the last 10 years, they can better leave this for someone else. Altough being all retro is really hip lately.