Of all rock 'n' roll’s tropes and traditions, is the official live album the most meaningless? There's a certain we-made-it hubris to it, an assumption that people not only care enough to see you perform but that they wish to relive the experience in the privacy of their own homes, too. It’s not enough to simply press "Record" and play: If you’re going to issue an onstage set, you’d better make sure that the band behind you is rehearsed, that your catalog is fit to be culled, and that every factor in the room, from the amplifiers to the engineer capturing it all, is ready to be immortalized.
What’s more, the band had better be prepared to be more than a mere traveling karaoke machine. If they can’t add some new element or interpretation to the tunes, why bother with a two-dimensional reproduction of something that happened in front of a three-dimensional audience? This troublesome sub-category has produced some incredible and urgent records, but during the past five decades, it has also built a monumental morass of between-album stopgaps, a wasteland of records that mostly remind you a band you like still exists. Live records, then, can be as functionally unnecessary as the carbon filler used to turn virgin vinyl black—there to keep up appearances, if little else.
Live at the Music Hall, an exhaustive hour-and-a-half, three-LP, career-crossing set from Phosphorescent, falls somewhere in between these extremes. Recorded during a four-night stand at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn nine months after the release of 2013’s Muchacho, the album attempts to meet the extra pressures of the official live format. Surrounded by a six-piece that features drums and auxiliary percussion, stopping for an intimate solo acoustic section, and adding a string quartet on "Song for Zula", Matthew Houck works to turn Live at the Music Hall into more than a mere document of another gig. The band recharges "Dead Heart", an old organ-and-acoustic dirge, with the neon-light electricity of Crazy Horse. They turn up the volume for a closing 10-minute version of "Los Angeles", where Houck screams and the drummer rolls and the pianist pounds until the air of desolation becomes an exorcism. And they amplify the space-cowboy glee of "Ride On/Right On", with Houck smiling audibly through the playful wah-wah pedal and calypso organ.
But the six-piece around Houck is more competent than combustible, a quality that’s long made Phosphorescent a good band to see for a 90-minute show but not one that makes you need to take them home. Phosphorescent was, for years, a crew powered by instability, where players would fall into and out of a fold that clearly belonged to the frontman. And no matter how many people ended up playing on them, his records were at their best when they read like personal transmissions, confessions delivered during the dead of night or from the bottom of a bottle. In recent years, though, Phosphorescent has somewhat codified its lineup, with anchors like Ricky Ray Jackson on guitar, Christopher Marine on drums and Scott Stapleton supporting with piano and harmonies. They’re all here. Still, these 19 songs make it clear that Phosphorescent remains Houck’s act. The players are there to support the songs, not to rearrange them. As a result, the musicians sometimes feel hemmed in, leashed. "A New Anhedonia" is heavier and more indulgent than the Muchacho take, but it mostly scans like the studio version sans its subtle flourishes. "Terror in the Canyons (The Wounded Master)", which follows, suffers the same problem. As if aware of the stasis, Houck screams the final chorus, his voice cracking in an uncontrolled eruption. For a singer who can make even the most tortured feelings sound like small talk, it’s a rare error of overexertion.
Indeed, the star here remains the same that it’s been for much if not all of Phosphorescent’s discography—Houck’s voice, a beautifully idiosyncratic instrument full of cracks and bumps and bruises that have always made his words feel lived-in and real. During the set’s three-song solo stretch, he’s in stunning form, whether condensing and distending the syllables in lithe little runs during "A Picture of Our Torn Up Praise" or harmonizing with himself and a loop pedal for the sublime close of "Wolves". During an organ-abetted rendition of "Muchacho’s Tune", he brilliantly renders the helplessness and hope of the song’s protagonist. He murmurs about being fucked up and being a fool, his voice in shambles. But then he strenghtens his tone subtly, and by verse’s end, he sounds the signal of his own redemption: “I’ll fix myself up to come and be with you.” The transition gives the familiar song a fresh layer of vulnerability. He's just as poignant leading the band through a full version of "Wolves", too, adding just enough soul-singer gusto to suggest abandon without losing control.
Phosphorescent has always indulged popular music’s great referential gestures. In 2009, that meant naming and recording a Willie Nelson tribute album in the same way Nelson had done for his own hero, Lefty Frizzell. In 2013, it meant using introductions and reprises to bookend Muchacho, a quick nod to concept albums. The spirits of Houck’s inspirations have always been a vital part of his music, too, linking his work to a strange but specific arc of predecessors that includes Will Oldham and Willie Nelson, Brian Eno and Sandy Denny, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. The live album, then, seems inevitable for Phosphorescent, another tradition-steeped move in a career rich with them. It’s obvious that Houck has studied how these things should go, the requisite features that bind the best ones. At points, he even gets there, but most of those successes don’t require a six-piece band, a string quartet or a three-LP set. They just require these songs, that voice and a little air to breathe.
