[.ca] Live

Just the Best!!!:
This is the best Strunz and Farah album yet. There is a song for every mood and taste in this album. The intensity of the exotic music played by this duo capture you heart from the very first song. For those who love perfection this could be a great source of inspiration.I can't wait to see a DVD with the songs in this album. A MOST BUY!!!

Combustable Medicine! Incandescent, mysterious, fulfilling.:
A friend gave me this disc as a present and it immediately became a favorite. I'm big on intensity and like Dvorak's "Symphony From The New World", The Ramones' "Rocket To Russia" or Bela Fleck and the Flecktones' "Flight Of The Cosmic Hippo", the only logical way to follow this gem is to play it again! Just give track 1, "Heat of the Sun", a listen and you'll hear the rhythmic intensity of The Gipsy Kings over a lighter, swinging, bass and a constellation of percussion, handclaps and cymbals. After setting the scene, the melody leaps out of the two guitarist's fingers and instruments with confidence and flair. The melody is passed back and forth, solos framed by percussion, the turn-arounds at the end of the verses bubbling with good humor. Music for a barefoot race on the beach between friends, or the sound track for the night you met someone special on the patio under the stars. Best of all this isn't all one tone, all fast and exuberent. They can turn it down a bit and paint a landscape of minor and major keys. Its not all lazy good natured feel-good, like Otmar Libert for example. Not dumb tunes carried by great playing or technical exercises. And the 'live'-ness couldn't be more apparent. I have no idea what disc the long, negative, review at the top of this page refers to. I haven't heard it. I can't go note-by-note comparing this disc to their studio efforts, yet, but I hear the playful and slightly relaxed atmosphere of live recording all through this disc. In a live recording you get no chance to fix it, so either you play it safe and dumb-down the hard parts or you really know your stuff and play better, inspired by the audience and lack of a net. Surely track 2, "Chincha", was recorded in a sound-check, there is no audience noise, but its a technical and demanding piece and the clock-work meshed perfectly, from the tight arpegio that starts it to the mounting intensity of the two-guitar figure it closes with. Some great stuff gets played in sound checks. I'm happy with this version of this tune. It is a shame though that there's no sample of track 6, "Bola", because I think its the strongest, and just bathed in the calm intimacy that the best live recordings capture. The technique used is stunning, the arangement always fresh, the pair of guitars coming back together time and again, in unison or in counterpoint. The blue notes and the quiet orniments on the main melody have an emotional wieght that just loud and fast playing can never convey. The magic of it is how tender three percussionists, a bass player and two guitarists can sound. And yet the timbale and cymbals playing against time at the end would do any Ska band proud. Neat stuff

Barely alive...more like a soundcheck.:
After waiting several years for a Strunz and Farah live CD, I am deeply and utterly disillusioned with the quality of this struggling-to-be live album. Now, Selva has robbed me! The first defect I noticed was the terrible engineering and sound quality: it sounds totally unnatural and not the warm acoustic sound we are accustomed to with their studio recordings. This is due to the fact that they failed to use microphones on the guitars, they are just plugged in. If you can't afford to make a live album right, it is preferable to just scrap the entire project and try to find a way to get a better sound. Because this "live" CD sounds like it's been done at the soundcheck (actually, to every fan's surprise, two tracks here were recorded at the soundcheck, which really doesn't make this an entirely live CD, does it?) and the track listing leaves much to be desired. Where's "El Jaguar"? "Gypsy Earrings"? Or perhaps something from the earlier albums? To put it mildly, this live/soundcheck CD is nothing more than an income generator for their newly formed label. Despite what you might believe from reading this, I hold Strunz and Farah in the highest regard, but I cannot comprehend their recent shortcomings. If you havent purchased a Strunz and Farah CD before I highly recommend you start with "Americas", "Primal Magic" or "Wild Muse". I hope this trend changes in the future. Good luck to all.

Absolutely Amazing:
This is the most amazing live guitar album I have ever heard. If you play this album once a day, for three weeks I guarantee you will loss 25 lbs. That's right. Twenty five pounds in three weeks. The guitar work is so fast, so precise, so energized when you hear it you will be jumping around like a bull frog in heat. This album is so great I am now the CEO of my own corporation. One year ago today I was pushing mops in a basement. Now I am the largest distributor of spark plug washers in the USA and I am expanding into Peru. So act now!

Absolute Magic:
I had to see these guys in concert to believe what my ears were hearing. S & F have broken the sound barrier. Now I have seen and heard what a guitar can do with a master driving it.

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