With his band's glory days nearly 20 years behind them, and the Kurt Cobain-induced second wind almost a decade gone now, Curt Kirkwood has seen fit to release yet another live Meat Puppets album, the second since 1999. That's a faster pace than Rush, for crying out loud! But wait, you say-- 1999's Live in Montana documented the Pups' original lineup, this one captures the new band. Exactly! That's why this album is even less necessary.
As a big fan of their initial quartet of albums, I hesitate to even call this band the Meat Puppets. The only remaining original member is singer/guitarist Curt Kirkwood, drummer Derrick Bostrom having hung up his sticks and Curt's brother Cris still in the grips of severe drug addiction. These Meat Puppets sound like a bunch of alterna-dudes hired from a Sam Goody in Austin.
So who, exactly, needs this? It seems even diehard Meat Puppet fans (and there must be some somewhere) have to be growing weary by this point. At least I'd hope so. The Pups' crumbling legacy has taken a hit with each release since 1987's Mirage. 1994's Too High to Die-- heralded as a breakthrough upon its release and certified gold-- is rivaled only by Sugar's Copper Blue in terms of used-bin-clogging alternative rock albums.
But if you must know, Live is pieced together from two February 2001 live gigs, one at Maxwell's in Hoboken, the other at Higher Ground in Winooski, Vermont (I dunno, maybe some ski resort was having some kind of deal: play a gig, get a free all-day lift pass). Curt and the replacement Pups draw their set list mainly from 2000's abysmal Golden Lies-- at least they had the good sense to keep their mitts off the classics. But even if for a moment one can forget who this band is purporting to be, the songs presented here rarely raise above mindless butt-rock and metal-ish alternawank that would have sounded incredibly dated in 1994 and sounds even more so now.
You can't even blame it on a poor recording, that's one of the things you can't complain about with this disc. Unfortunately for Kirkwood and the boys (as I'm going to call them from now on), this means the songs are revealed for what they really are: pure garbage. Kirkwood's once-eerie vocal growls are greatly subdued, and most of the fire is gone from the formidable guitar playing of yore.
There's not much good news to report here. Of the newer songs, "You Love Me" is a standout if only for its ability to evoke past glories, sounding very much like "Up On the Sun" (which gets a weak re-reading here). But by song's end, the constantly repeated refrain just sounds like a pathetic attempt to convince the diehards they're not just wasting their time with yet another in a long string of disappointing releases.
