LIVE AT THE PARADISO 14:04:07

After Present and Real Time found Van Der Graaf Generator reuniting with their classic lineup in 2005, David Jackson would leave the group again - but Hammill, Evans, and Banton soldiered on, retooling their sound to account for the lack of Jackson's woodwinds and sax. Live At the Paradiso captures a concert from April 2007 - just a few months before the group would go into the studio to record Trisector, their first album as a trio.

Two Trisector songs - Lifetime and All That Before - get early airings here, but for the most part this is old material from the classic line-ups albums (plus In The Black Room and Gog from Hammill's solo albums), significantly adapted to take into account the new lineup. Hammill plays guitar much more than he did back then, and that's largely the trick, using electric guitar to fill the gap where Jackson's wind instruments would have sat.

The end result takes a little getting used to - it certainly doesn't help that Hammill's voice doesn't have the range it did in the early 1970s, and is buried a little in the mix early on. However, the end result is a harsher, rawer-edged, in some respects more aggressive take on the material in the louder songs, but also capable of great subtlety in quieter moments. The outing of Lifetime here is compelling - a song conceived for the new line-up and so delivered without the baggage of listener expectations developed from years of hearing the classic songs with David Jackson on for so long. (Likewise, the choice of In the Black Room and Gog from Hammill's solo repertoire, being songs where Jackson's contributions were much lighter, shows cunning in selecting material that is amenable to the new approach.)

Get past that initial speed bump, and Live At the Paradiso makes a convincing case for VdGG's decision to keep going without Jackson, and is a key missing link between Present and Trisector.