Just as they were

In-concert live albums have always been curious creatures as far as musical artifacts go.

From their fraudulent early period (in which crowd noise was often added to studio recordings) to their semi-fraudulent middle period (in which postproduction studio “fixing” was often done and crowd noise was only sometimes added to studio recordings), they were part souvenir, part redundant best-of, and totally an easy way for acts to meet the album-delivery clauses of their recording contracts.

Live albums still fall into those categories. The 19 songs on the CD of Shania Twain’s CD-DVD Still the One: Live from Las Vegas (Mercury Nashville), for instance, are executed with such unerring fidelity to their original arrangements that one may as well stick with her 21-track Greatest Hits from 2004. Similarly, Van Halen’s Live: Tokyo Dome in Concert (Rhino), a recently released complete show from 2013, will have listeners who’d given up on the band marveling both at how strong the middle-aged David Lee Roth sounds and at how seamlessly the new bassist Wolfgang Van Halen meshes with his guitarist-father Eddie and his drummer-uncle Alex.

But the performances add little if anything to the versions on the band’s first six studio albums—each of which, incidentally (and perhaps tellingly), have just been reissued in newly remastered editions.

Still, in scrambling to come up with fresh ways of generating sales in the revenue-challenged age of streaming, acts have hit upon other live-album categories as well.

One of these, for lack of a better term, might be called the Real Thing—i.e., live recordings free of after-the-fact cosmetic surgery. ABBA’s Live at Wembley Arena (Polydor) is an especially valuable example in that the only previous such ABBA album (Live, 1986) was extensively doctored and thus unrepresentative of an actual ABBA performance.

The Swedish quartet’s Wembley show occurred in 1979 at the end of a six-night run. That ABBA had landed such a gig was not in and of itself remarkable—the group was, after all, the most popular act in the world at the time. What is remarkable, especially for a group known for its obsessive studio craft, is the extent to which Agnetha, Benny, Bjorn, and Anni-Frid were capable of putting on a high-quality show.

Not that they didn’t have help. They were accompanied by six instrumentalists and three background singers. But, as Live at Wembley Arena consistently demonstrates, what they accomplished onstage went beyond merely replicating the original sound of their many hits to injecting them with new life.

Some of what resulted feels awkward (“Hole in Your Soul,” “Summer Night City”—ABBA was seldom much good at rocking out). Bjorn’s polite and humble English-as-a-second-language crowd interaction, however, does not.

Big impression

Occasionally, a live album comes to define an act, either by catching it peaking or by crystallizing its most compelling elements. Frampton Comes Alive!, Cheap Trick at Budokan, and Johnny Cash’s Live at Folsom Prison come to mind. The two-disc, never-a-dull-moment Live from the Woods at Fontanel (Atlantic/Word) by NEEDTOBREATHE may well turn out to belong in such company.

The nine tracks from Rivers in the Wasteland would’ve been new to the Nashville crowd, so, understandably, Bear and Bo Rinehart (and Seth Bolt, Josh Lovelace, and Randall Harris) play them for maximum first-impression-making. But they also turn up the heat under the other eight, reaching the first of several climaxes just three tracks in: “Drive All Night” is so hot it could’ve been the encore.—A.O.