Leaves' Eyes Album: “We Came with the Nothern Winds: En Saga”

I'm not going to go into a full out track-by-track review. If you like Leaves' Eyes (for me, it's Kristine's vocals) then you will love the live concert. She sounds great, though there are a few times her voice falters a bit. I think her singing style isn't totally conducive to long concerts and long tours. That's no fault of her's and she does an excellent job of recovering in the few spots where she begins to falter.

However, I do want to comment on the live DVD and CD's. This is a relatively short show. The boxset includes 2 cd's with a total of 77min 52sec of music. Why? I have no idea as the whole thing would have fit on one cd. That's a rather curious / dubious sign that the record company is trying to get a few extra bucks out of the fans. Other than that, the CD sounds very clear and powerful. So no disappointment in the audio category.

The DVD of the live show has another problem, but one that is problematic to a lot of bands. The camera's used for the show were standard definition cameras, normally not a bad thing. Except in this case they are using a matted widescreen presentation. For those not familiar, that means they are presenting a 16x9 image on a 4:3 frame. So if you have a 16x9 TV, the image will be centered with black bars on the sides, top, and bottom. Yes, you can use the zoom button to fill up the screen, but the lower resolution of the picture becomes annoying. I find this frustrating that in 2009 we still can't get around this problem. Either use a full resolution 4:3 picture or an anamorphic 16:9 picture!

Thankfully, the sound on the DVD is quite well mixed and relatively strong. I still need to crank the amplifier up a few levels to match the sound of better (read more expensive) dvd productions, but not as much as releases from some other bands. As both an audiophile and a videophile, I'm kind of hard to please. But, also having done semi-professional CD audio and DVD video production, I tend to get inordinately frustrated productions that aren't well thought out technically. As far as I'm concerned, the record label did both Leaves' Eyes and their fans a bit of an injustice with this release.

This is the 2DVD/2CD set of We Came With the Northern Winds - En Saga I Belgia by Leaves' Eyes. I would say that this set is well worth the money for any person getting into Leaves' Eyes as well as dedicated fans.

One DVD is a concert of Leaves' Eyes and the other is sort of a documentary/insiders guide to the band. Both of which were lengthy and very interesting. The 2 CD set contains the bands live performance. This product is of high quality and the box art and packaging are just plain cool.