Thank You, Friends: Big Star’s Third Live … And More

Big Star’s Third

Naysayers claim the note-for-note recreations of highlights from Big Star’s first two albums (CD 1) and most of Sister Lovers (CD 2) by a rotating cast of mostly gray-haired indie-rock luminaries is superfluous. Maybe. But seeing the luminaries rocking a packed theater on the DVD could give you chills, so obviously do they love this agelessly radiant power pop. How do they love it? There are too many ways to count, but enlisting Carl Marsh to conduct the Kronos Quartet deserves special mention.

Power Corruption & Lies Tour 2013

Peter Hook & the Light

Imagine John Cale singing The Velvet Underground and Nico, and you’ll have a good idea of what Hook singing this minor New Order classic sounds like. Not only is Hook an alumnus of the band whose album this recording captures him performing, but he also has his Cale impersonation down pat. The Light, meanwhile, come off surprisingly unfettered for a group engaged in reproducing other people’s music, more than ably picking up whatever slack may result from Hook’s sounding no more like Bernard Sumner than Cale does Lou Reed.

50 Years Of Blonde On Blonde

Old Crow Medicine Show

One drawback of Bob Dylan’s The Cutting Edge was that its sheer bulk made hearing Blonde on Blonde feel like work. This high-spirited live recording of Blonde on Blonde in its entirety restores the fun, blending a recklessness worthy of the Rolling Thunder Revue with a hootenanny’s bonhomie. It also provides such useful services as stripping “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” of its somnolent properties and making sure that “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” gets appreciated for the great martyrdom joke that it has always been.

Carrie & Lowell Live

Sufjan Stevens

Skip the full-length, free-on-YouTube video. Watching Stevens and friends solemnly enraptured onstage undoes what’s best about simply hearing them—namely, detecting open windows by which the original album’s hermetic sensitivity/self-pity gets a means of escape, giving the songs a chance to breathe. The spell-breaking applause at the end of each track doesn’t hurt either. It brings the music down to earth, you might say. What keeps it there: the apparently unironic rendition of Drake’s “Hotline Bling” with which Stevens encores.

Encore

Admittedly, albums by ex-Ramones inhabit a narrow niche. But now that both CJ Ramone (né Ward, bassist 1989-1996) and Richie Ramone (né Reinhardt, drummer 1983-1987) have released their latest solo efforts, a few words about the risks of not letting the legacy of the world’s greatest punk band rest in peace may be in order.

Like Reconquista and Last Chance to Dance before it, American Beauty (Fat Wreck Chords) finds CJ making music that actually could’ve been written and played by his late bandmates. And he’s good at it. But he sounds more willful and less spontaneous with each go-round. Lesson: Sooner or later, the law of diminishing returns will kick in. Richie’s Cellophane (DC-Jam) takes a less literal approach, going for (and often attaining) the spirit if not the letter of the Ramones law. The fly in its ointment? Richie’s histrionic singing, which parodies Billy Idol (or maybe Sid Vicious) for no discernible reason. —A.O.