Gyllene Tider – Live at Ullevi
Reviewing this concert is easy and then again not. It’s great to see the Golden Five again, but still it sort of hurts, knowing this is it. I didn’t go to the Ullevi concert, so it’s nice to see it here, in my living room. All the songs I know, and have sung, for 40 years almost. It’s been a good relationship!
I’ve seen Gyllene live many many times, and from time to time I realize how little Per actually plays that expensive Gibson ES335 of his! Other things you get to see when you are actually on stage, instead of in the crowd, is that Anders is indeed Sweden’s most handsome man still, and he rocks that bass like no one else before. MP looks very satisfied playing those blues riffs, he is after all the Boogie Man, never forget. Getting close to Fritz, the Farfisa king, is also nice. You can see how beat up the organs are, with duct tape all over one of them. But that sound… mmmm! Syd, our little drummer boy, looks a little melancholy, knowing him he is a bit sad that it ends, and Ullevi was supposed to be the last concert, until Halmstad 3 was added. No, Norway doesn’t count.
So the disc? It’s a BluRay, region free even! Now when the media is all but dead we finally get a BD! The audio is mixed by MP in studio T&A, with some additional adjustments by Alar Suurna. Unfortunately only in 2.0 (stereo), but the sound is terrific, crisp and still very surrounding. My sub bass gets a workout. MP has done an amazing job, I imagine he did this at the same time as the live album. This is easily the best release video-wise, we’ve seen from anything Per Gessle related. Still I’m not entirely happy (am I ever??) since the video is a touch soft. Not as crisp as I would want it. This however can also be due to Gyllene’s LED backdrop, which pixelates things that aren’t really pixelated in real life. The colors are great though, and not to mention those angles…
Sadly there is nothing else on the disc than the concert itself. It would have been awesome to have gotten the recent documentary, and maybe even an interview with the Five as a bonus. (Just a hint for the future.)
A fun fact is that all the photos on the sleeve are taken by our own Kai-Uwe Heinze!
You can get this concert on DVD, BD and also on demand. Get it, you won’t regret it. 23 tracks of pure greatness. True story.
One last thought: the menu is in English…?
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April 7th, 2020
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This article was posted here on TDR in these categories:
TDR:Gyllene Tider, TDR:Live, TDR:Releases.