HEAVY CONSTRUKCTION

I can understand why this album leave some listeners feeling cold. Where the seventies live perfomanced featured improvs that blew the audiences minds, the improvs on this tour feel quite a bit less adventurous, even sometimes contrived. While the guitaring on said improvisations is still outstanding, Trey Gunn and Pat Mastellotto do not provide backing as deep as Wetton and Bruford. And a featured improv of the tour, titled The Deception Of The Thrush, is just an excuse to drop in noises and spoken word samples over a spacy rhythm section. On the surface it sounds like RIO, but hearing it repeatedly (it appears twice on this collection) it sounds lazy. And a few improvs sound like the band is dropping in large chunks of samples from other songs, and usually they turn into a noisy mess.

Otherwise, this is a good collection from a tour promoting one of the later Crimson's best albums The ConstruKction Of Light. They perform most of that album, and play it fantastically. Other highlights are VROOOM, which actually sounds better played by a smaller group, and a fine rendition of Cage. The cover of Heroes is not bad, but I've never been much of a Bowie fan.

A couple of tracks revel in Fripp's draconian attitude toward audience members taking flash photographs during shows. While Fripp has every right to ask people not to take such photos, stopping shows because of it is unfair to the large majority of the audience who paid to see the band and did not take pictures. Really, Robert. Don't be such a baby about it. Send roadies out to get the camera if you are so worried about the picture. But don't stop the show.