For his third Wide Hive release Coryell continues to plough his much visited power rock furrow. While his last outing Larry Coryell With The Wide Hive Players was dense with horns and brassy arrangements, The Lift is a stripped down, ‘live’ in the studio blues ’n’ punk outing. There’s little overdubbing, although he plays lead acoustic over his own chords on the lyrical closer ‘First Day Of Autumn’. But most of the cuts are smokin’ blues-rock romps, evoking Hendrix-style studio jams. When it works, as on the blistering, distorted opener ‘Going Up’, there’s danger in the air. The best songs also feature Thompson’s organ, his colours ramping up the jazzier chords of the title track. But many of the cuts lumber under the weight of porky, pseudo-psychedelic blues riffs: ‘Arena Blues’, for example, is a dim memory of ‘Tales Of Brave Ulysses’. Indeed, an American review of the The Lift praised it because Coryell sounds like he did in 1967: one might hope, nearly 50 years later, that he may have moved on a step or two.