2 out of 5

Label: digital self-release

Produced by: Alexander Mahn (engineered by)

I can’t remember if I bought this separately or if it was a bonus purchase with Comradely Objects, but either way… I’m not sure what the pitch was. I mean, nominally it’s to “offer an exploded view of the quartet’s unparalleled live show,” though four tracks that are either pretty direct copies of their album performances or oddly abbreviated seems like a strange way to ‘explode’ anything.

That is the impressive part, of course: how direct these are. For anyone who suspects that the tight syncopation of HL must require dense studio trickery, well, here you are: the foursome knock it out, note-for-note, live. That is undeniably cool, but you might also be able to call out the flaw there: beyond the cool factor, you’re not getting much more. To be kind of cheeky, I might say I prefer the cuts from Objects on this live set, since the bass is given more fuzz and the drums kick more, but once you get into the vibe of the studio album’s locked down production, the tracks ultimately groove the same.

We also get two songs from Interventions, and one of them – Interventions III – is just… Why? Why even include this if you’re going to chop a 6-minute song down to a 2-minute snippet version which isn’t even cut into the sequence of the four tracks all that well? I mean maybe this was as disruptive live as it sounds – it’s a hard changeover from III to follow Bending to the Lash – but, I dunno, I would’ve considered it a strange choice live as well then.

Lash itself has the same plus / minus as mentioned: it’s studio accurate, cool, and it’s actually more polished than the Interventions version this time, heh, so dealer’s choice on which you prefer.

I get that this was kind of extra material for fans; the rating reflects the value I feel it offers, and the likelihood I’d return to it over the albums from which the tracks are taken.