Operation Appreciation: The Old 97's - Alive & Wired

I've thought The Old 97's Alive & Wired has somewhat soft-sounding guitars that prevent it from entering my "Everyone should hear this! I would personally deliver a copy of this to every person I know!" realm of love. But man, those guys just love to perform. It's more ragged and much less polished than most of their studio albums (especially almost-maybe-kinda-masterpiece Satellite Rides), but having seen them in concert, I can say the album captures their spirit better than most live albums capture other bands.

 

And hey - the track list beats their Hit By a Train: The Best of the Old 97's collection, since it contains pretty much all the highlights from before then. The lone exception is "Victoria," but hey, that's what "getting the actual albums" is for.

 

Anyway, what I love so much about this album is that the band blazes through spirited versions of every. single. song. They never seem bored. They don't really have hits to half-heartedly karaeoke through. They don't pad the album with visual gags that translated better in concert (I'm looking at you, blink-182's The Mark, Tom and Travis Show). They just play, and the guitars might not be as audible as I'd like, but it's hard to argue with songwriting as strong as these tunes. Any of them. Except maybe "Coahuila," but I'm almost certain that that song might be some kind of inside joke for them or something.

The songs from Alive & Wired's immediate predecessor, Drag It Up shine here, too. "Smokes," in particular, blazes up through a wild coda, and yet they perform the rest of the songs with the same kind of passion of a hungry young band. "Wish the Worst," and "Stoned," off their first album, are terriffic, and I still consider "If My Heart Was a Car" on here to be the definitive version. The slowed intro here gives the song a fantastic sense of momentum once it blows open.

 

So really, all I wanted to point out is that the Old 97's have been one of the best bands in the country for over a decade now, and this live album is a much better testament to that than the "best-of" that was assembled after leaving Elektra records.