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The beauty of live performances is you take everything as it comes. If an artist flubs a line, misses a chord or hits the wrong key vocally, there’s no going back. A lot of “live” albums, however, fall short because they use a number of production tricks to cover over mistakes, or to make the audience sound louder than they really are, so they end up sounding disingenuous and in a way are a waste of time. Brandi Carlile’s new live album, thankfully, does not use these tricks and the performances are pretty damn great as a result.
Throughout the record, Carlile’s vocals shine because they are authentic and raw. She slides up and down the registers as best she can and for the most part it works (see the rocking “The Story” for example). The acoustics of the famed venue help make the overall sound richer, and the thirty-piece orchestra that accompanies Carlile and her band comes through pretty well without being overbearing or drowned out. Whether plowing through tracks of her own like “Before it Breaks,” putting her own spin on familiar covers like “Hallelujah,” or bringing the audience in to sing on “Turpentine” and her closing cover of Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” Carlile stirs this crowd up. As live albums go, this is one of the better ones.
