Primal Fear-Live in the U.S.A

Frontiers
2010

Live albums are often hit and miss for me. Sometimes a band just explodes on a live album. Other times it sounds like the studio versions with some crowd noise and maybe some between song banter thrown in. Let's see how German classic metal act Primal Fear stack up. So twelve years into their recording career Primal Fear release their first official live album. Primal Fear to me have always been like 90% Judas Priest and maybe 10% their own ideas. Even though they are perhaps low on the originality scale they do have two major points in their favor. One is that they do a good job of sounding like Priest and the other is that they have been around during that the real Judas Priest have been recoding poor album after poor album. Primal Fear are confident in what they do and that's a major selling point for this live album. They come across as a larger than life metal machine with and overwhelmingly loud and heavy sound. The disc presents an intro and thirteen tracks that serve like a live anthology pulling from several albums. The versions here are not much different from their studio counterparts. However the performances are so tight that fans are still going to pleased enough to have a definite interest in this album.