Band:	The Haunted
Album:	Live Rounds In Tokyo
Style:	Melodic death metal, Thrash metal
Release date:	December 10, 2001
Guest review by:	pdepmcp

01. Intro
02. Dark Intensions
03. Bury Your dead
04. Chasm
05. Trespass
06. Shattered
07. Hollow Ground
08. Chokehold
09. Leech
10. In Vein
11. Revelation
12. Bullethole
13. Silencer
14. Three times
15. Undead
16. Hate Song
17. Eclipse [studio track bonus]

I think The Haunted are one of the most interesting Thrash-Death bands out there. I am a big fan and I think their début is one of the best albums of the last ten years. I am also a big fan of Peter Dolving's vocals.

Let's get to the record. This is a live recording of a concert made after The Haunted's 'Made Me Do It' release. This means that only two records were published before this live release. In fact what we have here is the very best selection of 'The Haunted' and 'Made Me Do It'. It's fairly sufficient though it seems few; both are more interesting than what most band will produce in a whole lifetime.
Marco Aro was the singer for the concert, so all the songs have his harsh Death singing and not the Hardcore/Thrash-like screams by Peter Dolving.

I think all the songs are very good on their studio CDs, so my expectations were really high. This makes the fall even worse than ever expected! This record is terrible! The recording is so weak that the music loses all its energy. The vocals are bad and 'tired' and it all sounds distant. The overall impression is of an amateur band playing at a private party! Sometimes it's even difficult to catch the guitar work as it becomes noisy and confused. The singing in Hate Song, one of my all time favourites by The Haunted, is maybe the worst thing a singer could do! They probably sounded quite a bit better live (Marco Aro too, I guess), but the recording is so lo-fi that it's not even possible to give a real rating on performance...

This record was first released as a bonus CD with Made Me Do It. If it comes for free it's worth a listen (but no more than one, anyway). As a stand alone CD at full price it's an insult to all the fans and all the people who still buy records. Records like this only deserve all the scorn we can feel for a band that has the capability (and the budget) to do a great work, but instead falls so deep in the music business trap.

Overall impression: Awful. It's not even worth the Mp3 download bandwidth.