Search - Focus :: Live in America

Focus - Back With A New Lineup

Steven Sly | Kalamazoo, MI United States | 03/19/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"After years of being broken up, Focus main man Thjis Van Leer decided to reform the group with a new cast of young musicians shortly after the turn of the millennium. Featuring Van Leer on Keyboards, Flute, and occasional vocals, Bert Smaak on drums, Bobby Jacobs on bass, and the excellent young guitarist Jan Dumee, the band set to reclaim the glory years of one of the 70's better progressive rock bands. "Live In America" was recorded of a DVD / CD in Trenton New Jersey in the fall of 2002. The new band members were actually members of a Focus tribute band prior to being enlisted into the real thing. Because of this they are able to pull off the classic Focus sound just about perfectly. Dumee is especially impressive pulling off spot on renditions of Jan Akkerman's guitar style. The performances on this album are all good and the material sounds fresh. Van Leer's vocals are not quite what they used to be (Dumee helps him out on the high stuff), but with Focus being an 80% instrumental band, the vocal stuff was never all that important anyway. The band's well known material is here including "Hocus Pocus", "Sylvia", "Focus III", "Eruption" and several other nice album cuts. My one minor criticism is a lot of this album sounds really mellow. Even the harder rocking stuff, comes across as not being all that energetic. I saw the same version of this band about a year later and my remembrance is them rocking a lot harder than on this disc. Overall though "Live In America" has a lot to like, and it is a nice overview of where the band was as of 2002."