Behold The Best!
Ralph Quirino | Keswick, Ontario Canada | 03/20/2000
(4 out of 5 stars)
"Back in '73, at the tail end of the Woodstock era, these four British blues vets decided to get together, record a bunch of then-unknown Bob Dylan songs and got Dylan-fan/expert Manfred Mann to produce the whole shebang in his own fashion. The result? A winning set of easy-riffin' rock with Band-like musicianship and off-the-cuff spontenaiety that was atypical of the day. Now, almost thirty years after its initial release, the CD still sounds wonderful, its edginess untempered by time or trend, its performances still sharp and tangy. Raven's reissue is like manna from heaven. Fans of early Fleetwood Mac (before the Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks phase) will find this stuff much to their liking. It's a forgotten classic worth rediscovering."
THE BAND -- but from Britain
tom appleton | vienna, austria | 05/06/2004
(4 out of 5 stars)
"McGuiness Flint were, like, THE BAND -- but from Britain. Like the first couple of LPs The Band did, so too the first two records by MCGF were quite magical. Relistening to them years later I was less impressed with them, as the actual lyrical content struck me as vacuous, but instrumentally, they were spot on. This is latterday McGuiness Flint (after the original band's breakup) working on Dylan material, and it's much more like what an album by The Band of Dylan covers MIGHT have sounded like, if The Band had ever engaged in such a project. It's the kind of disc that takes some getting into -- I finally fed it into my computer, so I get to hear it piecemeal -- but then it has a special way of sticking around. Four stars, definitely."
Track Listings (13) - Disc #1