Despite a career dating back some twenty-three years, Ayreon have never taken to the stage. The band, the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist and producer Arjen Lucassen, has always dealt in ambitious flights of fantasy, and so it comes as little surprise that the line up for the series of concerts the band performed back in September 2017 reads like a who’s who of metal. Featuring vocal contributions from Floor Jansen & Marco Hietala (Nightwish), Hans Kursch (Blind Guardian), Tommy Karevik (Kamelot), Marcela Bovio (MaYan), Anneke Van Giersbergen (Vuur), Jonas Renske (Katatonia) and many, many more, the concert draws together tracks from across the band’s career and presents them as a ‘best of’, rather than as a conceptual piece. It was clearly a huge undertaking and this special recording is drawn from across the three nights.
With the band never having played live, Music Theories Recordings spared no expense in getting the event captured. With two hours of music (and twenty-eight songs) filmed in stunning HD by 30 cameras, Aryeon Universe is available in an exciting array of formats to tempt fans. The basic edition is a 2 CD set (reviewed here), comprising the compete set list. This is also replicated on triple vinyl (either coloured or standard) but the real feast for fans who missed out on the sold-out event itself is the five-disc ‘ear book’ which adds DVD and Blu ray to the equation. With added extras included a 90 minute behind the scenes film and interviews, Aryeon Universe is an essential package for fans of progressive power metal.
Kicking off with ‘prologue’, its clear that Arjen and his merry band are not going to let the opportunity presented by this extraordinary live excursion pass them by. The sound, right from the moment the roar of the audience leaps from the speakers, is obviously set to hit you squarely between the eyes, and as the (surprisingly Devin-esque) spoken-word prologue gives way to the band’s satisfyingly OTT entry, it’s clear that this is going to be a thrill ride as tongue-in-cheek as it is musically adept. Taking time to build up to the band’s grandest statements, it is a sedate track that opens the concert proper. The ethereal ‘dreamtime’ is a short piece that harks back to Gabriel-fronted Genesis with its lead synth and lilting acoustic melody, before the crunchy ‘Abbey of Synn’ sets things moving at a faster pace. With its raging guitars and deftly interwoven harmonies, ‘Abbey of Synn’ is an early highlight, whilst ‘river of time’ perfectly treads the folk-metal line, emerging as a cross between Hans Zimmer’s neo-folk film scores and Maiden-esque pomp. Following the short segue of ‘the blackboard’, we get the Dio-esque ‘the theory of everything’, which has fantastic, call-and-response vocals and plenty of whimsical synth weaving in and out of the heavy riffing.
What stands out, right from the start, is that, although the songs are drawn from across the map in terms of album placement, Arjen and his band have cleverly worked them into a set that flows beautifully, each track segueing neatly into the next, so that the concert serves as both a ‘best of…’ and an alternate-universe album in its own right where a musical and narrative flow is maintained despite drawing from some twenty years of musical history. Tracks like ‘Merlin’s will’, ‘dawn of a million souls’ (sounding particularly epic) and ‘star of sirrah’ work so brilliantly in the live environment, even outside of their album context, that it’s truly amazing that Arjen has never brought these pieces to the stage before. Meanwhile, one of the first disc’s most atmospheric successes is the short, perfectly-phrased ‘Comatose’, a piece of music that seeps gently under the skin thanks to the exceptional vocal work and tribal percussion that informs it. It stands in starks contrast to the utterly bonkers ‘Loser’, which is also fantastic but for very different reasons. Sort of like Yes crossbred with Genesis, if Beck had been the frontman and Flea had been drafted on bass and lascivious quips, ‘Loser’ is a multi-coloured, multi-tiered outing with a wry smile and a sparkle in its eye.
The second disc kicks off with two absolute epics – ‘the two gates’ and ‘into the black hole’, both of which see Ayreon at their most thrillingly bombastic. As an opening track, ‘the two gates’ is simply crushing. Huge riffs, a typically addictive melody and exquisite musicianship – these are the things that fans have long dreamed of with regard an Ayreon concert, and oh my, does the band deliver. In contrast, the spectacular ‘into the black hole’ takes its time to unlock the mysteries of its titular event, shifting easily from brooding contemplation of the absolute to a full-blooded assault. It’s a magnificent piece of music, although this is one track in particular where the surround mixing of the blu ray would certainly be preferable to the straight forward stereo mix. Highlights abound, as they do on disc one, but ‘computer eyes’ with its Floyd-esque guitar work is surely a stand-out moment, as is the lovely electric violin work of ‘magnetism’ (a track that comes across as a metal-infused Levellers track with its elegant instrumentation and beautifully-rendered vocals. However, it is a ferocious ‘age of shadows’ and a lengthy ‘intergalactic space crusaders’ that provide the sets biggest surprises, the former drawing upon folk, metal and even industrial in a way that will set surround systems on fire, the latter lodging itself in the brain thanks to a chorus that wouldn’t seem out of place on DTP’s wonderfully ridiculous ‘Addicted!’ album. It’s all so brilliantly colourful and theatrical that you can’t help but be taken in by it, with the band clearly having as much fun as the audience.
It should hardly surprise that Ayreon’s first live outing would come with a generous encore, and so it transpires. Lasting nearly twenty minutes, the double encore sees the band add a further three tracks to the set, with the bluesy prog jam vibe of ‘Amazing flight in space’ coming across like a mad mash up of the Who, Gov’t Mule and Genesis (as if things couldn’t get any weirder). The grand finale, however, is left for ‘the eye of Ra’, a sci-fi epic so packed with Adrenalin, it should come with a health warning. Syncopated rhythms, stunning vocals and tough-as-nails riffing – ‘the eye of Ra’ pretty much summarises the remarkable breadth of the Ayreon experience in six glorious minutes and we can only hope that the remarkably positive response sees Arjen bring this behemoth back out on the road once again.
Few one-off events ever truly live up to their billing, such is the gulf between anticipation and experience, but Ayreon Universe is one such event. With a reference quality sound mix, stunning peroformances from all concerned and a set list that flows seamlessly across the band’s impressive back catalogue, ‘Universe’ is a life-affirming, thrilling, creative spectacle that you’ll be listening to for years to come. Utterly stunning. 10
