On the Record: Live

Artist : Live
Album : Awake: The Best of Live (Universal Music)

Critics have said that grunge died with Nirvana's frontman Kurt Cobain, and that it died a slow and painful death. So it is that, more than 10 years since the "demise" of this genre, one of its surrogate outfits has released a greatest hits album.

Live's Awake: The Best of Live is an overdue nail in grunge's coffin. Live flourished around 1994, after the flannel-wearing and depressed-looking musicians were toppled from their thrones. The band ruled the modern rock chart with anthemic tunes to the accompaniment of vocalist Ed Kowalczyk's preaching about asceticism and Chad Taylor's searing guitar riffs.

Live made it big with Throwing Copper, their first release under a major label. A barrage of guitar, freely suggestive lyrics and soft-loud dynamics a la Nirvana in I Alone, Selling The Drama and All Over You are a ready-made formula for alternative stardom.

However, as they grew older, Live didn't grown up and refused to abandon this recipe in their subsequent records, blind to all developments in the music scene. Awake is thus a witness to their diminishing creative innovation. Only rarely in their late career did this Pennsylvania quartet come out with brilliance as in the squealing The Dolphin's Cry on their third album, Distance To Here.

We are doubtful that there is life for Live after this greatest hits package. -- M. Taufiqurrahman

;JP;MTR; ANPAa..r.. Music-Music-OTR

On the Record: The Music

Artist : The Music Album : Welcome to The North (EMI)

Imagine Led Zeppelin (the legendary group's watered-down version, of course) fronted by Rush's Geedy Lee and you get The Music's Welcome to The North.

The Led Zep comparison is inevitable here. As their name suggests, this quartet from Leeds, England, carries Zeppelin's swagger and signature high-pitch vocals cutting through the mesh of reedy guitars.

I Need Love and Bleed from Within are based solidly on tribal drums taken from Zeppelin's Immigrant Song. Incidentally, Robert Harvey's vocal register resembles that of the Rush vocalist than that of Robert Plant.

The only thing that stands out between The Music and Led Zep is the use of electronica beats, which gives them a modern tone in the same vein as the Stone Roses.

Despite this, going through the tracks on North is like listening to extended remakes of Led Zep's annals.

Track after track flows without much to say and all hooks seem wasted. -- M. Taufiqurrahman