True bootlegs are endangered species. In the past, they've circulated through networks of diehard fans and avid tape traders, apart from the regular distribution avenues of the record industry. Through a particularly good or bad version of a familiar song, an odd cover in the setlist, or a burst of rambling stage banter, they not only can act as a kind of unofficial currency between fans but can offer a very different and potentially unguarded glimpse of an artist in his or her true setting. Now that anyone with an internet connection can download The Complete Basement Tapes or The Boss of E Street, the traditional equation of rarity with value is beginning to break apart. By titling his first live album Bootlegs, the Norwegian singer-songwriter Sondre Lerche is making an obvious nod to this medium in pop history, which is appropriate considering his acknowledged debts to Paul Simon, Burt Bacharach, and latter-day Elvis Costello. He definitely seems like the kind of guy who has assembled his own personal version of SMiLE.
Bootlegs as a title also signals an aesthetic choice: Rather than scrub the recordings of wrong notes, stage banter, and audience chatter, Lerche has decided to leave the rough edges in, as if to hint at-- but not indulge in-- the shitty sound quality of a bootleg. First of all, he recorded most of these tracks in Bergen, Norway, ensuring a hometown audience's excitement for a local boy done good. They are a vocal crowd, and at times it's difficult to tell who's more juiced: the artist playing "Two Way Monologue" or the audience hearing it. The only downside is that too often the fans persuade you more of the music's quality than the actual music does. Even when the momentum flags, the crowd rarely does.
Perhaps more crucially, these recordings were made on just two tracks instead of four or more. One captures the thrum of the room, the other the noise made by the band, with outsize prominence granted to the drums and especially the high hat. That rhythm-first presentation adds a sense of immediacy to "Domino" and "Airport Taxi Reception", not only presenting Lerche's band as a dynamic unit but also drawing a clear line between performers and listeners. It's perhaps most effective on "Private Caller", which descends into the kind of rock din that Lerche's studio albums too rarely allow. Oddly, it doesn't work quite so well on closer "Modern Nature", when it's mostly just Lerche and his guitar, and it's apparent just how hard he's grasping to be clever.
Bootlegs doesn't actually sound truly raw, but it does sound raw-ish. In the case of this particular artist, that's more than enough to lend these songs new life and new urgency compared to their studio iterations. Throughout his 20s-- this release marks his 30th birthday-- Lerche has shown a tendency toward crippling professionalism; his albums sound too slick, too clever by half, too consummate. His songs have been so finely crafted that they're nearly squeezed dry of personality, delivering in a voice that careens upward into a grainless and therefore indistinct falsetto. The discrepancy on Bootlegs between studious songcraft and rambunctious execution occasionally sounds distractingly self-conscious, but Lerche still sounds better here for sounding so unguarded and loose. It's like watching your uptight friend get shitfaced. Lerche slurs his delivery at the beginning of "Sleep on Needles", emphasizing the warbled vowels and hissing his "s"s; then the band comes in and makes good on the unhinged intro, hitting much harder than we've come to expect.
