Beaten, battered, and wholly disowned by the punk, pop, and post-glam scenes that should have hung upon their every twisted nuance, the Doctors of Madness played their last-ever concert in London on October 26, 1978, a two-hour extravaganza that highlighted virtually the band's entire record repertoire and was littered with new songs and studded with special guests. Little of that is remembered here. Released a full 23 years after the show itself, Into the Strange offers a peculiarly truncated vision of the event, serving up two new songs (the turbulent Trouble and an ace rendition of the Velvet Underground's What Goes On), but no guests and, so frustratingly, none of the emotion, release, and reckless abandon that made the concert itself so memorable. The first new band release in almost a quarter of a century is, of course, cause for celebration. But the celebration that it purports to recapture is criminally conspicuous by its absence. That said, the 11 songs that do make it onto Into the Strange stack up alongside any best-of the Doctors of Madness you could conceive, from the foreboding acoustic verse of Mainlines that opens the disc to the shuddering freneticism of the closing Out and peaking midway with a deceptively gentle Marie and Joe, forever one of Richard Strange's most desolate ballads. The Velvet Underground cover, too, is masterful, relentlessly fuzzy, and propelled by precisely the kind of backbeat that established Pete DiLemma among the era's most rudely underrated drummers. The sound quality isn't always perfect -- there's a cassette-like ambience to the recording that will be familiar to all connoisseurs of '70s-era bootlegs -- and the 45-minute running time is certainly a cause for discontent. But an extravagant ten-fold booklet cover is a dramatic feast, littered with lyrics and some very striking band photos, and Strange's liner notes are as swaggering as the band themselves always were. ~ Dave Thompson, Rovi

1		Mainlines (Prologue)
2		Trouble
3		Sons of Survival
4		Back From the Dead
5		Triple Vision
6		Marie and Joe
7		Into the Strange
8		What Goes On?
9		Mitzi's Cure
10		I Think We're Alone
11		Out!