PLAYING THE FOOL - THE OFFICIAL LIVE

I've known since the early 70's that I liked this band, and I've always appreciated the aspect of newer bands that borrowed selectively from the Gentle Giant sound. Yet I shunned this cd for many years with unfounded biases of overindulgence and potential eccentricities. My bad.

Please don't make the same mistake I made - add this great live "best of" cd to your collection while you can. This is truly complex and progressive rock performed flawlessly and with pretty good sound reproduction. There's an Octopus suite that's really...well, sweet; and they add nice different touches to ALL of the tracks. That's one of the nice things about this: not only can they (and DO they) perform this sophisticated material live with few imperfections, but they also throw in some nice changes so that you don't just get the studio tracks re-hashed live. There is a nice live feel to the entire album, and you get a good sense of the fun that these guys could have on stage as well. Worthy.