Scorpions
Live Bites

Third official live album by the Scorpions, this "Live Bites" of 1995 was essentially released to fill record and idea gaps. Indeed, it doesn't add much to the band's history, however, underneath, it's not that bad.

It's a real live collage with performances ranging from 1988 to 1994 captured in different concerts worldwide (Germany, Mexico, the United States, Russia), and then assembled together as if it were a single show. The output volume of the recordings is quite high, the sound clear and crisp, and the performances overall, despite lacking particularly inspired insights, are technically perfect; yes, but perhaps too perfect, in some ways they seem like studio versions with the audience in the background, in short, I think there's quite a bit of overdubbing, but oh well.

The setlist largely consists of tracks from the more recent albums like "Face the Heat" and "Crazy World" and generally from the '80s-'90s period; the lineup is the same as the last album, except for a couple of songs, "Living For Tomorrow" and "Rhythm Of Love", which still feature bassist Francis Buchholz instead of his successor Ralph Rieckermann. The first part of the CD is perhaps the most emotional, with "Tease Me Please Me" properly heating up the atmosphere, "Is There Anybody There", a compelling "Rhythm of Love", and then reaching its peak with a dive into the '70s, "In Trance", which I would say is very convincing in its sonic compactness and masterfully sung by Meine. After these first tracks, we begin to travel through highs and lows. "Living For Tomorrow", performed in Leningrad in '92, is one of the best moments, a pity that the exact same version was already published a few years before in the ballads collection "Still Loving You". A good cover of the popular Mexican "Ave Maria No Morro", where Klaus Meine exhibits decent Spanish over a convincing acoustic guitar backdrop set up by Rudolf Schenker and Matthias Jabs. The rest is represented by very hard performances, with drummer Herman Rarebell (in his last participation with the Scorpions here) going heavy-handed, but also by a plethora of somewhat repetitive riffs and predictable solos ("Concerto in V", "Alien Nation", "Hit Between The Eyes", "Crazy World").

However, it is also the first live where the famous "Wind Of Change" appears in the track list, entrusted to close the concert, a great song, but played and sung without infamy and without praise, very similar to the studio original, in short, the desire to take risks and improvise is zero, and this is the flaw that characterizes the whole live. In addition to the 13 live tracks, there are two unreleased studio recordings, actually one, because "White Dove" was already released as a single a year before and is actually a cover of a song by the Hungarian group Omega, a decent ballad with a pacifist, catchy lyrics, but nothing to go down in history for; the other is "Heroes don't Cry", another slow piece, this one decidedly more boring, with overly intrusive and poppy choruses.

What to say, an album without many pretensions, the classic commercial move placed there just to keep the band's name in the spotlight. A decent performance, certainly far from the times of "Tokyo Tapes", those of the brilliant guitarist Uli Jon Roth, but also inferior to "World Wide Live", saved, however, by a good, albeit not very honest, job in post-production and editing, a job capable of providing the right compactness and sonic power, aspects that are nonetheless important in the metal genre. An album originally intended for the band's most die-hard fans, but now you can find it around at bargain prices, so if you like melodic metal, consider it, after all, there's much worse out there.