Recorded in between sets at this year's Coachella Music Festival in a small studio at the Los Angeles radio station KCRW, Live From KCRW is the fourth live album from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds to date, and possibly one of their most daintily crafted too. The album consists some cuts from songs from Push The Sky Away, the group's most recent album, and a handful of old works, with Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey, Jim Sclavunos and Barry Adamson opting to keep things a little more simple and a little less intimidating than their live shows can be.
Nick and his Bad Seeds aren't the kind of band to just throw together a live album to cash in on the Christmas rush though and this is the case with KCRW, a thoughtfully put-together live album that works with the new material some of the group's finest back catalogue material, including 'The Mercy Seat', 'Stranger Than Kindness' and 'Into My Arms,' rather than rehashing the same stuff.
Bar the applauses at the end of the tracks and the odd bit of banter to and from the stage, it doesn't really sound like your conventional live album. The audience is audible, and when they do chime in they only ever seem gleeful and amused, but their remarks never take anything from the quality of the recording or the performance. Its much cleaner and more focused on the material at hand than the band's other live albums tend to be, which sometimes get lost trying to recreate the rawness of a Bad Seeds live performance. But there's an intimacy to the album that couldn't have existed outside of a live album, one that no doubt mirrors that same intimacy the lucky few who were crammed into KCRW's studio must have felt during the performance. This closeness is demonstrated by the stripped back performances at hand, an antithesis of the cluttered front cover of the album. On the cover we see Cave surrounded by flight-cased equipment, equipment that you can barely hear in the final product, and all the better for it.
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