THE DECEMBERISTS Double Live Gonzo

Double trouble: The Decemberists drop a two-CD live set

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: April 10, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/apr/10/double-trouble-decemberists-drop-definitive-two-cd-ar-1833098/

The Decemberists, We All Raise Our Voices to the Air (Live songs 04.11-08.11) (Capitol)

LIVE WIRED: The Decemberists deliver a concert keepsake

Kiss' Alive! (1975); Neil Young's Live Rust (1979); Rush's Exit. . . Stage Left (1981). Those are just three of the monolithic live double albums that had an immeasurable impact on me during my impressionable formative years. Two slabs of black vinyl packed neatly into an extra thick — double-wide, if you will — fold-out jacket that promised and delivered the next best thing to actually having been there, from the roar of screaming crowds (preferably not dubbed in post-production), to the nearly palpable exultation of the pro-forma extended guitar and drum solos, to the swaggering stage banter. . . those discs offered something akin to a genuine window into the seductive, even mythical realm of the Rock Concert.

       And there were more. As my record collection grew, and my musical vistas broadened, I submersed myself in Zeppelin's monolithic The Song Remains the Same (does anybody remember the hilarious "Stairway To Heaven" ad-lib "does anybody remember laughter"?), found myself wishing that the Who had been kind enough to add a second disc to Live at Leeds (which they finally did on the 2001 deluxe reissue), and marveling at the strange glam-era visage of Lou Reed that adorns the cover of Rock 'n' Roll Animal, an album that, in due course, led me back to discover 1979 Velvet Underground Live with Lou Reed, and finally Reed's hilarious and, at times, disturbing 1978 train wreck Live: Take No Prisoners, which, to this day, contains some of my favorite unintentional comedy routines. Oh, and let's not forget Ted Nugent's way over the top, not so cleverly self-referential Double Live Gonzo, if only because it's fun to say out loud and it pre-dates the Nuge's emergence as a right-wing wing-nut.

       My nostalgia for the double-wide, double-live experience has remained largely unabated over the years. As recently as 2000, for example, I took the time over the course of a single weekend to listen to all 25 of Pearl Jam's "Official Bootleg" series, which amounted to 50 discs in total. And I don't think I flinched once. So, if there's a target demo for We All Raise Our Voices to the Air (Live songs 04.11-08.11), a two-disc, 20-track live collection drawn from eleven shows the Decemberists' performed in the wake of their big commercial breakthrough (2011's The King Is Dead), then I guess I'm it.

       And yet, until a recent drive to Richmond, I was finding it surprisingly difficult to drum up the necessary enthusiasm to work my way through the entire set. The first disc starts out promisingly enough: frontman Colin Meloy, the band's bespectacled, well-read frontman, assures a crowd in Oregon that, "This is not the Keith Urban concert. . . if you mean to be at a Keith Urban concert you will be sorely disappointed" — just the kind of bemused, off-the-cuff banter you want from a good live album.

       And, this is a good live album. Very good, in fact. The band delivers the necessary King Is Dead hits ("Calamity Song," "Down By the Water," "This Is Why We Fight") with rousing aplomb. They offer up the requisite deep cuts, dating all the way back to "Leslie Ann Levine," an acoustic lament from their 2002 indie debut Castaways and Cutouts. And they indulge in their own brand of the extended jam, powering gracefully through all 16:09 minutes of "The Crane's Wife 1, 2, 3," an epic story with a suitably obscure narrative that ebbs and flows and then ebbs and flows some more.

       The problem is, by the time We All Raise Our Voices arrived, I’d already seen, streamed or in some way digitally accessed, various iterations of the material on the album, including the part where Meloy sheepishly introduces “Dracula’s Daughter” as “the worst song I’ve ever written in my life.” I even bookmarked YouTube clips from the tour that I found particularly amusing and/or compelling. Which begs the question, is there really a place for the live album, much less the double-live set, in the Internet age?

       I’m sure there’s no easy answer. But, the well-defined rationales behind the double-live have largely vanished. For the record label, it was once a rather cheap, if somewhat extravagantly packaged way to strike while the iron was hot by quickly bringing new product to market on the heels of a successful studio album/tour. It also bought time for the artist to unwind, recover, and begin work on the next album. And, fans got a raw, unvarnished keepsake to tide them over until the next big release and tour.

Sadly, very little of that applies anymore. So, until someone comes up with a new business model for the double-wide, it just may be on its way to being a thing of the past — a past that Colin Meloy, for one, apparently shares a certain nostalgia for. . .