Mandel's debut remains his best early work, introducing an accomplished blues-rock guitarist capable of producing smooth, fluid lines and a variety of tasteful distortion and buzzing via an assortment of tone pedals and customized amplifiers. He augmented his flash with an adventurous appetite for orchestrated, quasi-classical strings (especially in the eerie symphonic title cut), jazz-blues-rock fusion in the mold of
the Electric Flag (as on "Before Six"), and even a bit of country in the presence of top steel guitarist
Pete Drake.