the live/recorded dichotomy

so i just came back from seeing phoenix at the fine line. first strange thing: it's a camel-sponsored event, at which i'm pretty sure they were giving out cigarettes in the alley or something, and yet phoenix had the marshall logos on their amps covered with duct tape. certainly wouldn't want to give an amp company that's helped thousands of musicians achieve their dreams any promotion when you can shill for a tobacco company that kills those same musicians.

but i digress. there are only a handful of bands that i've seen that were worse live than on record, the main ones being spoon and phoenix, and i think they suffer from the same problem: their albums are just too stunningly good.

i remember when my band back east recorded our first album. we were a blues band, and so our live sets leaned heavily on improvisation, but pretty soon after we recorded the tape (that's right, tape, muhf*cker), the other guitarist and i found ourselves playing the solos from the record, or at least little bits from the record, at every show. the thing about albums is that there's a dictatorial quality to them, and not just from the end of what the audience expects. i think that musicians, unless there is a stated goal to shy away from this, often end up replicating the album without even thinking about it. and most bands don't have records as good as phoenix and spoon.

phoenix's latest album, it's never been like that, feels like the product of countless hours honing every part--every guitar riff, string squeak, guttural grunt and drum fill--into the absolute perfect part. it's like a katana: a forged piece of metal folded a thousand times until the edge is so compressed and fine it can cut through stone. mess up one of those folds and the whole thing's shot.

so when the drum intro to "consolation prizes" kicked in, i knew just what i expected to hear: a gritty, growling ostinato on the guitar. so when it didn't sound like the album, it was a let down. same goes for the similar guitar part after the first chorus. the way the album sounds makes it seem as if they picked the only really possible and correct part for every instrument at every moment, and this is a pretty much impossible thing to replicate live. and even if they did, looking so definitively french and louche didn't really help the energy. understand, they weren't bad. just not as good as their disc.

it's a weird dichotomy, this live/recorded thing. the plastic constellations, despite putting out their best-sounding album so far, are still better live than on record. the absolutely unhinged energy they put into live performance is a huge part of it, but does that mean it can't be captured on record?

it seems like one has to suffer in comparison to the other, simply because they're always being held up to each other. the bands that seem to do the best at straddling the divide seem to be the ones who treat the two things very differently: jimi hendrix and wilco spring to mind immediately, but i'm sure there are others.

anywho. off to read.