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This live album contains a nice mix of styles that fans of FZ can appreciate, although as far as the styles covered by Zappa over the years go, the songs manage to tread a sort of middle ground, omitting his extreme excursions into orchestral weirdness, Jazz dissonance, or Doo-Wop ditties on the other end of the spectrum.

As I only received an unlabeled copy of this I can't really say anything about the musicians involved.

These recordings seem to date from different periods and although this site lists George Duke as co- musician, at this point I find that it unlikely that this applies to all tracks, as some of the material seems (to my ears) stem from a time that he wasn't involved with Zappa anymore. I could be wrong though.

Tracks 2 to 4 are one continuous piece of music.

1) Bathtub Man Blues - improvised-sounding Vocals by Zappa + Duke Standard blues with slightly distorted electric piano solo followed by an electric guitar solo (incredibly fast and very melodic for Zappa)

2) Space Boogers (instrumental) Short 'chattery' electric guitar / keyboard piece with percussion, reminiscent of certain 'uncle Meat' effects and merging into:

3) Hermitage (instrumental) Practically continuing 'Space Boogers' but mainly on percussion, leading into staccato orchestral passages and continuing into:

4) Trudgin' Across The Tundra (instrumental) A vehicle for either trombone or synthesised trombone over a sort of pedestrian beat.

5) Occam's Razor (instrumental) Another electric guitar solo as found on 'Shut up and play yer Guitar', 'Guitar' and 'Trans-Fusion' over the usual (for these excursions) discreet band backbeat. Towards the last 30 seconds or so the song goes into one of Zappa's well known tunes, the title escapes me at the moment though. Not quite 'Sofa' but very near it in style. Damn, I just can't place it at the moment.

6) Heidelberg A nice soft dialogue between Zappa's guitar and tinkling keyboards, gathering some drive towards the second half of the song, becoming a bit of a foot-stomper.

7) The Illinois Enema Bandit Just another version with the unmistakable voice of Ray White, although the vocal part quite abbreviated. Massively long guitar solo from FZ, followed by vocals by Frank himself, although deviating substantially from the previously released versions.

8) Australian Yellow Snow A substantially speeded up version compared to 'Apostrophe' for the first minute or so, but the rendition then (mainly) moving quite close to the original for quite a time, apart from audience banter and spoken improvisation. I especially enjoy this, as I've never heard this played live before. It contains a lot of the complete 'suite' such as Saint Alfonso's etc. and then Zappa goes into one of his audience talks which merges seamlessly into:

9) Rollo One of Zappa's 'nicer' orchestral excursions along the line of tracks found during his 'Studio Tan' and 'Sleep Dirt' period.

The sound on this release is crystal clear, I have nothing to moan about, it's perfect. These tracks must surely have been taken from recordings intended for live release.

I can't find a single thing to complain about here, it's everything I could wish for from one of FZ's posthumous releases, much better than some of the other recent Vault offerings.

I have to rate this three stars. Of course it's not a Zappa masterpiece (how could it be?), but it's a solid offering, and I hope this is an indication of similar things to come. I'd like to have given it four stars, but that would be sentimental, compared to the albums he released while he was till with us.

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