Review by Steve Huey

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.

Review by Steve Huey 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.