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For those who don’t know Arjen Anthony Lucassen, we should start from the early days of this brilliant Dutch multi-instrumentalist and mention some of his creations, such as the entire Ayreon discography (a series of concept albums with the participation of many singers and musicians of the metal scene) and Star One (another concept series linked to dystopian worlds and interpreted by four great voices, including Sir Russell Allen and Floor Jansen).
In his boundless discography, there is space for rock, blues, progressive, psychedelic experiments and a lot of taste for the Seventies and Eighties, and this “The Long-Lost Songs”, which will be released under the moniker Lucassen & Soeterboek’s Plan Nine, is precisely the The maximum expression for a tribute to sacred monsters such as the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Twisted Sister and Van Halen, just to name a few whose echoes will echo when listening to this full-bodied double album.
Alongside the tireless Arjen, on vocals we find Robert Soeterboek, singer of those Bodines who at a concert over thirty years ago amazed the very high creator of Ayreon and led him to record some auditions with them; samples which then remained in the attic, as, according to what the two artists reported, they did not fit well into the substratum of those times, given that those typical airs of the late Seventies did not fit well with the prevailing grunge of the period.
Soeterboek’s timbre is well suited to that mixture of southern rock, blues and rock, given the nuances we hear in “Gimme The Nighttime”, “Get Down To Bizniz” and “Let It Ride”, which are so close to Molly Hatchet , to Lynyrd Skynyrd but also to ZZ Top, while in “Ice On Fire” we get closer to the Van Halen period of “1984”. There are also more intimate moments with the saloon ballads “Long Cold Nights” and “Before The Morning Comes”, with the Hammond organ (played by Joost van der Broek) seasoning a sound decidedly close to Rainbow.
Once we have analyzed the content, however, we feel like delving deeper into this release; in fact, the format in which it is made deserves a separate discussion.
This “The Long-Lost Songs” is a double disc with thirty-two tracks, in which in the first part we find the songs pre-recorded in the early nineties and here revised and corrected with a production that makes them very captivating, while in the second part we find some of them in demo format (recordings from when Lucassen and Soeterboek met and jotted down the ideas that are now seeing the light), as well as instrumental versions and recorded pieces that had never seen publication.
Here, a release like this is for the use and consumption of the most die-hard fans and those completionist followers of their idols’ discographies. In addition to moving far away from the sounds that characterize his most famous recording creations (we must not forget how he explored very ethereal sounds with The Gentle Storm and Anneke van Giersbergen on vocals), in this “The Long-Lost Songs” there are many moments of full-bodied blues and few rougher passages, and there are none of the great moments of innovation or inventiveness that the Dutch giant has accustomed us to.
A record therefore for those who want to have all of Arjen Lucassen’s production but which will not involve those who only have his masterpieces in their ears, as well as being indigestible due to the repetition of songs with very few changes except in the recording phase.
