HEAVY HORSES (NEW SHOES EDITION)

A fine album made even better. The sound is excellent. Moths, Rover, Acres, Mouse police, Brown mouse are gems. I like the title track more now too. There's an extra heaviness too it on this set. The living in these hard times tracks are fine sounding extras. Also the Botanic tracks are quite good too. The extra studio material on all of these sets have been mainly excellent. This set has been the only one of the first 13 sets that has a couple of unfinished sounding extras. Everything in our lives and Horse Hoeing could have done with a bit more remixing and a couple more notes filling in some empty moments. While good to hear I'd rate these 2 down near the bottom of Tulls giant list of non album tracks. I quite like Beltane and Quattrain and I think Wilson could have touched up the drums a bit more on the former and removed the vocal bit from the latter to give them a more finished edge. Overall this set is 5 star although I wouldn't have included everything in our lives and Horse hoeing. It's a couple too many incomplete products on top of Quattrain and Beltane(which are worth having on the set)

The New Shoes edition of Heavy Horses includes not just the original album (given a pretty decent remix by Steven Wilson which breathes new life into the material whilst remaining true to the album's original aesthetic), but also the full live concert from 28th May 1978 in Berne - some parts of which later emerged on Bursting Out.

On the one hand, it does substantiate that Bursting Out did do a good job of capturing the Heavy Horses tour within the confines of two LP's running time, but on the other it is nice to have a full concert from the era to take in the bits of the set list that had to be trimmed for Bursting Out - and since only five songs from Berne made it onto that album, whilst the material here is familiar most of the specific performances will be new to most listeners.