The Mirror Man Sessions

1	Tarotplane / Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band 19:08
2	25th Century Quaker / Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band 9:50
3	Mirror Man / Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band 15:46
4	Kandy Korn / Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band 8:06
5	Trust Us (Take 6) / Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band 7:14
6	Safe as Milk (Take 12) / Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band 5:00
7	Beatle Bones 'N' Smokin' Stones / Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band 3:11
8	Moody Liz (Take 8) / Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band 4:32
9	Gimme Dat Harp Boy / Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band 3:32

Barnes & Noble

Let's quash the rumors first: Despite their original packaging, the four long, gristly jams that make up 1971's original MIRROR MAN weren't recorded in 1965 but in late 1967, as part of a projected double LP. This reissue tries to reconstruct what that album might have sounded like. As such, half the disc presents extended live-in-the-studio workouts that shatter Beefheart's earlier concise garage rock into loose, extemporaneous fantasias on blues tropes, while the other half offers utterly unique, hallucinatory songs with instruments and voices doubling up, splitting in half, and drifting across the sound field. (Most of the latter were subsequently recorded for STRICTLY PERSONAL; some overflow from these sessions appears on the SAFE AS MILK reissue.) Beefheart's singing distills the excesses of the Delta blues he gorged himself on into a wonder of growls and whoops, while the band invents an idiom entirely its own. Directed by drummer John French's uneven pounding, it weaves like a drunk, then snaps back into sublime coordination. Douglas Wolk

All Music Guide

The Mirror Man Sessions features the complete remastered contents of Mirror Man, albeit in a resequenced running order, and fills out the rest of the CD with a number of bonus tracks taken from additional recordings, both finished and unfinished, made around the same time for what would have been a double album titled It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper. As a listening experience, the package will appeal more to those who value the instrumental Beefheart; the Mirror Man album is, of course, essentially a 50-plus-minute jam session, containing as it does only four songs, and the bonus tracks -- many of which appeared on the One Way label's reissue of Safe as Milk -- mostly consist of jams and instrumentals which push the boundaries of conventional blues-rock, with a Beefheart vocal tossed in here and there. Some may miss Beefheart's surreal poetry, gruff vocals, and/or free jazz influence, while others may find it fascinating to hear the Magic Band simply letting go and cutting loose. Steve Huey