The Never Ending Pool

Thanks for sharing your view Stefan, as always an interesting read.

For my money, the tour this year has been good. Vocally, an improvement from Autumn 07 and despite the feeling that his voice deteriorated a bit towards the end of the recent european tour, overall, it's probably in about the same nick as early 07 or maybe even a bit better.

The band remain impressive on certain nights and workmanlike on others. I agree with Drifter, allowing Donnie to solo more would help. I've grown fond of Denny and seeing him at very close quarters in Salzburg reminded me of just how good he can be. That said, the main problem with this band compared to say Campbell/Koella or Campbell/Sexton is that the sound lacks any real 3rd dimensional feel. The sound doesn't project outwards the way previous guitar combinations have. It doesn't feel as confident or have the ability to naturally ground the songs. So the result is that songs like Watchtower don't manage to be quite as apocalyptic as before or Hollis Brown just isn't quite as sinister or menacing. The atmosphere of certain songs is diminsihed somewhat while still remaining good or solid or competent or very good or whatever. Just lacking that little spark of magic that went before.

A freshening up is desireable and there are two obvious ways to achieve that:

1. Bring in some new musicians to take the sound in a different direction. This has tended to happen every few years and this current band are now into their 4th year.A change might be natural at this time.

2. He has more or less used the same pool of 50-60 songs for quite some time. He needs to restructure the sets by taking out his song book, rehearsing and adding 15-20 new songs into the mix.