KANSAS - LIVE AT THE WHISKEY

I was rather interested in listening to this Kansas live album. Their last good studio album was "Audio Visions" back to 1980. Even if the Wiskey Bar is a legendary venue, it shows the descent of the band who used to fill up large concert halls (at least in the US). Kansas did the same blunder here with "Magnum Opus" than what they did with "Lamplight symphony" on "Two For The Show" : they cut it by four which is really a shame for this very good studio song.

This album is rocking all right, and fortunately a violin player has been added to the line-up again. I missed that so much during the last studio releases, that this fact only make this live album interesting to me. Can you imagine, "Song for America" without violin ? I guess not. This song is performed a bit faster than the original but sounds very nice.

What a pleasure to hear that Kansas still can play good music.

Most of the songs here belong to the repertoire we all love : "The Wall" always subtle and nice although Steve's vocals are not really great here, "Dust In The Wind" not as good as on "Two For The Show" but that version was really splendid, "Miracles Out Of Nowhere" with Walsh again a bit weak but with a gorgeous finale, "Mysteries and Mayhem" hard-rocking alright but Walsh is trying to do too much on the lead vocals.

"Portrait" with a very nice piano and violin intro and then rocking furiously especially during the wild finale, "Carry on Wayward Son" a bit too long and too hard to my taste, "Down the Road" another solid piece of hard-rock from their best album ever "Song For America" should you have forgotten.

What else do we need ? "Incomudro", "The Pinnacle", the full "Magnus Opus", "Journey from Mariabron" ? Probably. But let's not get too difficult. Kansas could have chosen to fill out a live set with their more recent albums, so we are on the good side here. It is an indication of course about what the traditional Kansas fan was expecting to hear after those long yers of misery...

OK this is not the ideal Kansas live album ("Hold On" could have been skipped easliy), but we are really close to it. Walsh's voice is not extraordinay, Livgren and Steinhart are not there but this record sounds nice as a whole. Like most of the Tull live albums, this one sounds harder than the original versions (I don't know how this relation came to my mind when listening to this work).

Since it is a bit inferior to "Two For The Show" I will rate it three stars.

Welcome back, Kansas. Still there are some hope for good things to come...