Live In A World Full Of Albums

What's the point of live albums? you may ask. The point is they allow you to hear a band you like perform live anytime you want without paying £50 for a ticket and having to stand behind thousands of drunk people who "sing" along to all the songs and step on your feet as they "dance". They are also a better alternative to rip-off greatest hits compilations that some bands churn out with alarming regularity (yes, Rolling Stones, I'm looking at you). The following are some of my favourite live recordings:



Deep Purple: Made In Japan
You need to ask where this was recorded like you need to go into Poundland and ask how much things cost. The record only contains 7 songs and clocks in at just under 77 minutes, but it epitomises everything that is right about classic rock. Songs you know are extended with lengthy keyboard, guitar and even drum solos and some may argue that it's mostly a band saying "look at how well we can play", but that's the point of live music: it shouldn't sound like greatest hits with an overdub of crowd noise. Smoke on the Water, Highway Star and Strange Kind of Woman are all brilliant here. It would have been a nice touch if the Japanese audience had been treated to Woman From Tokyo which had been recorded but not yet released at this point, but you can't have it all, I suppose.

Iron Maiden: Live After Death
"Scream for me, Long Beach," demands Bruce Dickinson at several points of this 1985 double album and it still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up today. Disc one was recorded over 4 nights in California and this is Maiden when they were at their absolute peak - no synthesiser weirdness here, thank you very much. That’s not to take anything away from disc two, which was recorded at the legendary Hammy O in London and is equally awesome. Everything you’d expect from Maiden’s first five albums is here: Aces High, 2 Minutes to Midnight, The Number of the Beast, Run to the Hills, to name but a few tracks. Live After Death is 90 minutes of pure British metal played the way it should be, before comedy acts like The Darkness did their best to sully its good name. Is this the best live album ever? Maybe, but it’s definitely Iron Maiden’s best ever offering.

Slayer: Decade Of Aggression
I was lucky enough to see Slayer live when they were touring to promote this album (all 3 regular readers of this blog will already be aware of this fact) and can testify that they are indeed as good in the flesh as they sound on the record. If I stick this CD on, drink half a bottle of Bell’s and close my eyes, it’s like I’m back at that very concert. Another double album, Decade… is jammed full of fan favourites from Seasons In The Abyss, Reign In Blood, South Of Heaven, Show No Mercy and Hell Awaits. As a band who had been plying their trade for 10 years at this point, Slayer were, and still are, an incredibly cohesive unit and there are very few of the mistakes a lot of bands tend to make when performing their own material live. Anyone who likes any kind of thrash metal or aggressive music cannot live without this record in their collection. Also worth a mention at this point is the live DVD Still Reigning where Slayer perform the album Reign In Blood in its entirety. \m/\m/

Agnostic Front: Live At CBGB
Country, Bluegrass, Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers, to give the venue its full and misleading name, had a fantastic reputation for hosting some of the best punk and hardcore shows in New York. Agnostic Front were certainly no strangers to CBGBs and they have long been one of the most popular New York Hardcore bands (one of many boxes you can put them in, along with hardcore punk, crossover thrash, oi and, to a lesser extent, metalcore). With 3 albums and an EP under their belts at this point, the record serves as a kind of best of their first 10 years. The great thing about most hardcore bands is that they are forced to play around 200 shows a year just to make ends meet and, as a result, they know their songs so well, they could probably play them in their sleep. Agnostic Front demonstrate that brilliantly here with songs like Friend Or Foe and Victim In Pain sounding hundreds of times better than on the poorly-produced and poorly-performed original recordings. An under-appreciated gem from an under-appreciated musical genre.

Also worth listening to
Sick Of It All: Live in a Dive - blistering hardcore, way better than their first live offering which had an out-of-tune guitar on most of it.
S.O.D: Live at Budokan - a crossover classic, not actually recorded in Japan.
ALL/Descendents: Live Plus One – basically the same band, but with 2 different singers serve up fantastically melodic punk rock.

Avoid at all costs
Metallica: S&M – starts off well, but generally sounds like band and orchestra playing completely different songs to each other.
Nuclear Assault: Live at the Hammersmith Odeon – John Connelly cannot sing and play guitar at the same time and ruins this.
Green Day: Awesome As Fuck – never heard it, but their ‘studio album, live album, studio album, live album’ policy sickens me. Surely a trades descriptions issue.