Album Review: Robin Trower - Robin Trower Live! 50th Anniversary Edition
Fifty-one years after the music first filled the Stockholm Concert Hall, Robin Trower’s Feb. 3, 1975, concert can finally be heard exactly as came out of the sound system.
The gift - and it is a gift - comes in the form of Robin Trower Live! 50th Anniversary Edition, which updates the 1976 album with a stellar remix, five tracks left off original LP and the songs presented for the first time in their original running order.
The updated edition opens with the knockout, one-two punch of “Day of the Eagle” and “Bridge of Sighs” that was inexplicably left off the 1976 release that instead opened with “Too Rolling Stoned,” now in its proper slot as the seventh of 12 songs played that evening.
“Gonna be More Suspicious,” “Fine Day” and “Confessin’ Midnight” are the other new additions.
Just three albums into a post-Procol Harum solo career that now numbers more than 25 long players, Trower was already a guitar god in ’75. He was never flashy and used few effects, opting instead for a clean tone and well-chosen blues-rock notes snug in the pocket of his rhythm section of drummer Bill Lordan and singer/bassist James Dewar, who delivered Trower’s lyrics with the intensity of the Free-era Paul Rodgers.
Live! 50 also includes the original LP, whose juxtaposition underscores the mastery of Richard Whittaker’s remix. With the treble dialed back, the midrange dominating and providing a cushiony bed for Trower’s powerful riffs, listeners can experience one of the era’s most under-appreciated slingers at a youthful peak, still looking to prove himself as a songwriter and bandleader in his own right.
Grade card: Robin Trower - Robin Trower Live! 50th Anniversary Edition - A-
6/16/26
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