Eight 1990s live albums that badly fail to capture the magic
- If you like live music albums you want to share in the concert experience.
- To feel and relive the atmosphere and the magic of the gig.
- These eight albums fail to do so and fall flat.
By StevieMac
Nirvana - From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah
It’s a personal thing, but this live album made up of a bunch of recordings from all over the place and across several years just doesn’t work for me. It’s quite different from the band’s MTV Unplugged In New York album a couple of years earlier. But then it would be, this one is much closer to the real Nirvana live.
The two did start out as part of a plan to release the unplugged recording in a double set with another live album. But in the aftermath and grief of Cobain's death, it all proved too difficult to pull together at the time. The unplugged release came in November 1994 and From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah followed separately, with minimal overlap of songs, a couple of years later in October 1996.
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There’s a warning if you decide to listen to it, don’t use headphones especially not in-ear ones. There’s a load of on-stage feedback, amp noise, and Kurt Corbain screams that’ll make you wince. If you pay attention there are quite a few off-key vocals, bum guitar notes, and other errors. So yeah, true live perhaps, but is that really how you want to remember the band and Cobain?
As with their unplugged album, there’s often very much a split audience in terms of liking or disliking this one. Let’s face it, their MTV album sold close to 13 million copies and still gets slammed by many. From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah sold around 2 million worldwide. It’s already much less popular with fans, even if you don’t mind it a real test is whether you still dig it out to play now and again, or head for other Nirvana albums instead.
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