SURFACE TO STAGE

This live album from Threshold captures them on the Subsurface tour, and it's a sign of how strong an album that is that some six of its nine songs get renditions here. As for the rest of the track listing, that varies a little between editions; more recent rereleases have restored some songs to the running order previously left out to fit this onto one CD, but those tracks all have versions with Mac on vocals on prior live releases so the omission on earlier editions is no great crime. Naturally, the run of albums from Hypothetical to Subsurface is best-represented, but there's at least one nice throwback to the Giant Electric Pea days with Into the Light from Psychedelicatessen getting a great little runthrough.

Mac would leave Threshold shortly after the release of their next album, Dead Reckoning, and would die in 2011 at a shockingly young age, making this to date the last live release from Threshold to feature him (and unless something gets dredged up from the archives unexpectedly, that seems unlikely to change). Here, his deft command of the live context and rapport with the audience is fully on display.