There are times when the sonic quality of this audience recording resembles a series of high speeding cars suddenly braking and then thudding into each other Of course, once your ears finally begin to acclimatise to the shifting murk it’s possible to make out a pretty good show by the boys. And speaking of crashing cars, Manhattan/Neurotica is taken at a markedly different tempo. The track was still in the early stages of development, coming in as a straightforward 4/4 footstomper rather than the whirlwind overview of the Big Apple that it would later evolve into. There’s a certain fluidity in the middle section as they work on the business of finding parts for a piece that had only just made its live debut the previous evening. Elsewhere in the set, following a lugubrious but rapturously received Red, a stately Matte Kudasai, and a gently undulating Sheltering Sky, there’s a particularly lucid reading of Neal And Jack And Me. Whatever concerns there are about the somewhat muddy qualities of the source tape, Sartori and a blistering but tragically incomplete Larks’ Tongues ramp up the excitement regardless.
