MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA — Between Nothingness & Eternity (review)

MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA — Between Nothingness & Eternity album cover Live album · 1973 · Fusion Buy this album from MMA partners
2.5/5 ·
Warthur
The only live album from the original Mahavishnu Orchestra lineup might have been a godsend when it first came out, but it's since been supplanted in importance by The Lost Trident Sessions: all three songs from this album are there, plus more songs on top of that, and the sound quality is significantly better. (Well, obviously, it's a studio recording and this is a live album, but even so for a live album from the era the sound quality here is only mediocre-to- average).

The setlist here consists of expanded versions of the first three songs from the Sessions, but the studio versions are much tighter - in particular, Dream in this twenty-minute rendition simply lasts for too long, especially considering the five minutes of extremely quiet playing at the beginning - which, thanks to the recording standards, aren't easy to hear.

Ironically, the New York concerts the album documents were vividly described during the preamble of the infamous Crawdaddy magazine article on the band - in which the band members made no secret of their frustrations working under McLaughlin, which prompted the personal falling-out which ended this lineup of the group. Mahavishnu devotees may wish to own it simply for that reason; for everyone else, it's alright, but now that we have the intended studio followup to Birds of Fire available to us it's utterly redundant.
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