LADIES OF THE ROAD

For sure "Ladies of the road" offers a great snapshot of the "Island" period live material and every KC fan should be saying "thank you" to DGM for releasing it, since the only previous record dealing with that was the horrid "Earthbound", one of the worst produced albums ever. The performance smells very strongly of jazz, being this lineup one of the mostly jazz-oriented in all KC history, proceeding on the same path started with "Lizard", their most complex album ever. The musical level is quite high, personally speaking I'm no huge fan of this KC incarnation, however the version of "Cirkus", even starting weakly, turns quickly into somewhat apocaliptically good...absolutely stunning; not to mention the intriguing "Groon" and the interesting "Get thy bearings. I found myself pretty confused about "21st century schizoid man", for sure not the best version of the song (Boz Burrell's bass playing and vocals are not even comparable to John Wetton or Greg Lake), however it's for sure different, as I said before more jazzy in the attitude and slightly slower. I found the second disc quite useless: a mix up of different live impro on "21st century schizoid man", with a quite bad sound quality. Very funny a 50 seconds BLUES (!) version of "The court of the Crimson King". As I pointed out earlier I'm no HUGE fan of this KC period, however this is useless in terms of this review, since "Ladies of the road" is an excellent live album and I strongly suggest it to every prog lover.