ALL OVER YOU ... TOO

Caravan's four studio albums of the 1990s are an odd bunch, not least because they only recorded one album of all- original material in the decade (The Battle of Hastings). Cool Water consisted of demos from the late 1970s with some extra tracks tacked-on from a studio session, and then there's All Over You, which consisted of rerecorded material from their classic albums given radical rearrangements to give them a more modern sound.

Then there's All Over You... Too, recorded in mid-1999, which is the sequel to All Over You. It's another set of updated songs, and is recorded by essentially the same lineup - with the addition of Jim Leverton on bass (who'd sat out the All Over You sessions despite having joined the band for Battle of Hastings) and Doug Boyle on guitar (offering an extra twist similar to those he contributed on the Canterbury Comes To London live album), and with a guest spot from Hugh Hopper of Soft Machine on one track.

This feels like a more successful take on the same general experiment that All Over You was trying. It helps that Caravan aren't necessarily messing with their most beloved material here. That's not to say they don't touch any of their sacred cows - some of the tracks here (like the cuts from For Girls Who Grow Plump In the Night) are highly-regarded Caravan tracks which are undeniably in the top tier of their catalogue.

At the same time, they're more willing this time around to dip into material which perhaps isn't so well-remembered - many consider Caravan to have been on the wane a little on Blind Dog At St. Dunstans' and at a low ebb on Better By Far, but they're happy to dip into those albums for that material, and arguably Nightmare (from Better By Far) the sections of the Grubby Little Oik suite (from Blind Dog) they rework here have never sounded better - and it's less of a shock to hear the experiment because even if you are a Caravan fan you probably don't regard the original versions with quite as much fondness as, say, any of the material on In the Land of Grey and Pink.

That said, even the reworkings of truly first-class Caravan classics here are somewhat interesting, the band doing a decent job of casting their classic material in a more modern form which suggests that their perceived unfashionability in the 1990s may well have been one of the great musical injustices.

If you only care for Caravan as a 1970s classic prog act and have no desire to hear that material played in a way which substantially differs from the original albums, you won't like this album regardless of how well-executed it is. If, on the other hand, you're open to a different take on familiar and not-so-familiar Caravan songs, it's worth a punt.