Reviews list for Dissection (SWE) - Live Legacy (2003)

Nuclear Blast gave a decent bootleg a boost in power, resulting in one of the better black metal live albums available.

By 1997, Dissection was on a roll. The band’s two studio albums had garnered massive acclaim from critics and fans alike, and their live performances were attracting hundreds of dedicated metal fans that were as devoted to the Swedes as they themselves were to Satan (apparently). Labels had even started trying to make the most of the band’s burgeoning popularity by releasing a superfluous EP (Where Dead Angels Lie) and compilation of rare material (The Past is Alive) that no-one really needed. They sold, as expected. Then guitarist and vocalist Jon Nödtveidt went and got himself arrested for murder, and all that promise and excitement came to an end as quickly as it had begun. Promises of a new Dissection album would have to be put on hold for at least seven years, and chances of the band ever being the same after that time were slim to say the least. It’s in desperate times like this that bootlegs really come into play, and the Dissection live bootleg titled Frozen in Wacken was just the thing fans needed to ease the pain. A live recording of the band’s performance at the Wacken Open Air festival in Germany on the 8th of August 1997, Frozen in Wacken had better quality production than is normally attributed to such unofficial recordings, which is no doubt why it eventually came to the attention of Nuclear Blast.

The German label, realising that the band had never managed to produce a live album before things turned nasty, got their hands on the recording and set about turning it into an official Dissection release. Being the clever marketers they are, they waited until a year prior to Nodtveidt’s release from prison, before reminding everyone of just how potent an outfit Dissection were and would be again (or so they wanted us to think). On February the 17th 2003, Live Legacy was released, and I think it’s fair to say that there are few fans that care about the album’s less than ideal history. The production of the bootleg has been improved on dramatically for Live Legacy, with the drums and vocals in particularly having a very powerful and clear sound. The guitars don’t have quite the same emphasis, but they are still adequately audible throughout and contain a strikingly similar tone to The Storm of the Light’s Bane session. The crowd appears totally into it and you do get a good sense of what a Dissection concert might have been like during this golden era, which is not something I can say about some of the overproduced and excessively filtered discs coming out these days. I’m not a big fan of live albums in general, but Live Legacy is one of the few that I do come back to from time to time for this reason alone.

I have to say it’s quite humorous to hear Jon speaking between tracks in exactly the same vocal style he uses to spit forth Dissection lyrics. Either the guy refuses to lower the veil of evil that his musical persona grants him, or his recent promotion to Priest of Satan in the MLA has given him the “Permanent Voice of Satan +1” attribute. Despite the Live Legacy material being lifted straight from the same recording as Frozen in Wacken, the tracklisting is actually quite different. The order of a few tracks have been switched around for whatever reason, but the biggest difference is that Night’s Blood was removed altogether from Live Legacy due to irreparable flaws in the recording. Other than the obvious disappointment this causes due to the excellence of that track, it also creates a major hole in the flow of the album, with the At the Fathomless Depths intro just stopping all of sudden, just when the band were about to launch into Night’s Blood. I think Nuclear Blast would have been better served to remove the intro as well, as the constant reminder of what’s missing is more affecting than the intro alone. Regardless, the other six tracks present are all great, and while this selection may seem on the small side, the running time of over forty minutes is more than adequate to convey the power Dissection had in their prime.