YOU CAN'T DO THAT ON STAGE ANYMORE, VOL. 2

The crown jewel of Zappa's You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore series. Whilst the other double-disc sets were grab-bags of recordings from a range of performances, for this release Zappa chose to focus on the tapes from a small set of performances over a couple of days in Helsinki. The album does not present a recording of any one concert in particular, but is compiled in such a way as to provide a cohesive concert experience for the listener and to cram as many of the different tracks into the set as possible, which I always find preferable in live albums to more scattershot affairs.

As far as editing goes, it's absolutely seamless - then again, Zappa had decades of tape manipulation under his belt at this point. The particular care and attention given to these performances suggest that Zappa considered them a particular high point of his concert career, to the point where he felt they deserved a complete YCDTOSA set devoted to them.

On balance, he's probably right since this involves the lineup who made the likes of Roxy & Elsewhere and One Size Fits all - an incarnation of the Mothers who had a somewhat better balance between the pioneering experimental music that art rock and prog fans love Zappa for and the more comedic elements of his style.

Over time, I have found Zappa's post-1960s comedy has gone stale for me, which means that this set has rather dimmed in my eyes - but I'd say that if you wanted just one live album from this period of Zappa's work, this actually pips Roxy & Elsewhere to the post, since it doesn't ask the listener to appreciate what was essentially a visual spectacle in the concluding dance number from that album.