Threshold: European Journey

Career-spanning live set from Surrey prog-metallers.

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

While sharing part of its title with their last studio album For The Journey, these performances delve just as deeply into Threshold’s back catalogue. And the abiding impression from the 15 tracks here is just how well they’ve maintained the quality of their output over two decades.

Now back in the fold for good, Damian Wilson’s swollen-chested vocals are particularly impressive throughout, adding an emotive melodrama to 1997’s magnificently brooding, nine-and-a-half-minute Part Of The Chaos and a righteous anger to their more politically charged material such as The Box and Mission Profile.

Elsewhere, 2001’s chugging, malevolent Long Away Home and the urgent industrial groove of Watchtower On The Moon show they can rock as hard as the doomiest of their contemporaries.

In fact, as an entry point sampler for discovering one of Britain’s more underrated prog-metal bands, you couldn’t hope for much better.

Johnny Sharp

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