LIVE AT THE PONGMASTERS BALL

Ozric Tentacles are a band who very much honed their craft in a live context, toiling away on 1980s festival circuit and peddling their cassettes as a sideline before they began producing their studio releases. Live At the Pongmasters' Ball captures a Shepherds' Bush Empire gig which covers over a decade of Ozric delight, with the setlist including material from as recent as the Pyramidion EP and as far back as the original run of cassettes.

What's revelatory about a good Ozrics live album is the fact that the band are able to evoke their otherworldly sound perfectly in a live context. If you'd only heard their studio albums, you'd think that such sounds couldn't be replicated live, when in fact it turns out the real problem they had to grapple with in their early years was producing an acceptable replication of their cosmic live jams in the studio. The extra atmosphere and variation offered by the live context enriches the already well-honed compositions in question. On this set, Ed Wynne earns the MVP spot with some guitar heroics of a sort you wouldn't normally expect from the Tentacles, but which slots into their sound perfectly.