"Is there anybody aliiiiiive out there!..." - and with that rather standard inciteful greeting by Bruce, the Italians absolutely roar back and it's established. All parties are ready for a party. This is the first, chronologically speaking, of a batch of Magic Tour titles for March 2008 by Crystal Cat and it's a special document. A beautifully captured audience recording that completely documents the wonderful atmosphere, the energetic performance and excellent setlist complete with a handful of audibles to keep the edge on a special evening.
While the recording is excellent, this title and tape are all about atmosphere and setlist. The show sounds like it's taped at about the middle of the building and all instrumentation isn't well defined early on but is very well balanced - you can feel the space as the tape really breaths nicely and as you might expect, gets clearer as the show progresses. The first surprise of the evening is also the first appearance of "Adam Raised A Cain" in just over a month (since the October 25th Oakland concert). It's not as powerful as you would have liked, maybe it's just the recording not close enough to feel the energy but it builds and in the end completely satisfies. Always a great tune to hear live. and then the back-to-back playing of "I'll Work For Your Love" and "Incident On 57th Street". Great stuff. It seems the crowd wants to chant between every song, not sure who was entertaining who that evening but it sounds like everybody had a great time. The change-ups I really like in this show are the encore selections with "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" an audible that displaced the apparently setlisted "Growin' Up" and especially "Thunder Road" replacing "Kitty's Back". "Kitty" is always a crowd rouser but it is one of my least favorite ESB tunes. Not everyone would agree these changes make the setlist better but it's in favor of my tastes anyway. The bonus tracks are complimentary to the core tape. "4th Of July, Asbury Park" from Albany, New York 2 weeks earlier is a recording that is void of much bottom end but nice. However, the November 19th Boston recording of "This Hard Land" blows the whole rest of the material away! Wow, this is a great sounding recording and a highlight for it's inclusion here.
The packaging and presentation is right up there with the best of anything Crystal Cat has ever presented, providing an 8-page deluxe glossy booklet with some stellar performance shots of the band - not sure if they are from the Milan show but they are outstanding in every way. There is also a glossy insert with a copy of the actual hand-scrawled setlist on one side and the 2007 tour dates on the other. This standard is replicated throughout these five new titles in the batch. A superb Milan package and a highly recommended Magic Tour title to pick up.
