For a live album to make sense, it needs to document a moment worth remembering. The recent tread toward "instant live" records epitomized the live album as concert memento, delivering freshly burned CDs into the hands of eager concertgoers mere minutes after a show's end. Other live artifacts seek to preserve a crucial moment in the performer's career, frozen in time (hopefully) with one's energy and excitement intact. This just-released document of a three-year-old Guided by Voices show-- part of New West's extensive Live From Austin, TX series-- is the concert album at its most mundane and frustrating, showcasing a perfectly fine performance by a very good band and nothing more.
Guided by Voices never released a truly seminal live record, though the career-spanning live performances compiled as Live at the Wheelchair Races from the Hardcore UFOs box set come close. For the most part, GBV's extensive concert bootlegs are best described by phrases beginning "the one where" (i.e., "have you heard the one where Bob gets drunk and asks whose dick he's gonna have to suck to hear something in the monitors?"). Sadly, this new 2xCD concert document seems like an average night out for late-era Guided by Voices. Making matters worse is the fact that the band's big live finale was already released in the form of the Electrifying Conclusion DVD. Two-and-a-half years after the band's breakup, Live From Austin evokes none of the poignancy of the band's beginning, middle, or end.
The performances on Live From Austin are unerringly solid, and the setlist is characteristically thorough. The sound quality is not bad for a live show, though Bob Pollard's vocals tend to overpower everything else in the mix. As is often the case with live GBV recordings, the banter often outshines the music, starting when Pollard interrupts the crowd's chant of "G! B! V!" with "sing it! Learn it! Know it!" and then introduces "Demons are Real" slurred to sound kind of like "Stevens are Real".
Highlights from the set include early favorite "Pendulum", "Everybody Thinks I'm a Raincloud (When I'm Not Looking)" from the band's final album Half-Smiles of the Decomposed, and all the usual mid-period "hits," played no better and no worse than usual. Pollard's trademark oddball sloppiness, coupled with the workmanlikeproficiency of his bandmates, does not necessarily make for an engaging long-term listening experience. If you've seen or heard a live GBV show from the group's final 10 or so years, you probably have a pretty good idea of how these songs are performed-- tight, energetic, entertaining, but often lacking the ineffable magic of the band's best work.
