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If you thought multi-national metallers DragonForce sounded in a bit of a hurry on their six albums to date, from the opening bars of this live album it’s clear they find an extra gear on stage.

This Japanese arena show opens with Marc Hudson’s turbo-operatic howl, before the bass drum is set to double-pummel, twin guitars prepare to shred in harmony.

With four tracks from last year’s Maximum Overload and six fan favourites, they play a good balance of old and new material, with sufficient vim and vigour that at one point even keys player Vadim Pruzhanov is moved to take his synth-guitar stage front to join in the thrashathon.

We know this because it’s on the accompanying DVD, whose HD footage captures the whole furious affair pretty neatly, alongside a fairly substantial chunk of behind-the-scenes material, from Sam Totman showing us his pinball machine and novelty guitar collection to fan meet-and-greets.

Classic Rock 214: New albums A-L

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.