The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Live

[#] Throwing Copper (1994)

A populist mystic masterwork.

Reviewed February 17, 2022

(This is an album that was previously covered on the Rediscovering! Click the link in the table to read my first impressions, or read on for how they might have changed.)

In the mid-90s hunger for alternative-music-or-that-which-resembles-it, Live finally broke through after three albums with Throwing Copper, an album that was as easy to make fun of as it was hugely catchy. You can still hear singles from this one like "Lightning Crashes" or "All Over You" on any random FM rock station in America to this day. The arena-sized drums and riffs and Ed Kowalczyk's spiritual lyrical fixations might strike some as the dress rehearsal for Creed, but ignore them, Ed's a more imaginative lyricist than Scott Stapp anyway. This is simply a populist rock record with an eye towards reincarnation, and it's great and I'm tired of pretending it isn't.

Live's way of stacking hooks is apparent on the second track, "Selling the Drama", each verse, prechorus, and chorus bringing a new earwormy vocal melody to the front. These songs work on multiple levels, from powerful pop rock songs with huge dynamic shifts like on "Iris" to surprisingly thoughtful laments of the band's hometown of York (about two and a half hours away from yours truly) on "Shit Towne" or the worth of lowly, grumpy service workers on "Waitress". Throwing Copper isn't perfect, and sometimes the band lets the pacing go cold one too many times towards its back half ("T.B.D." might as well be the Tibetian Song of the Dead), but the hits far, far outweigh the misses. It makes me wonder how I missed this one for so long—I would've been all over it back when Superunknown was my favorite album in the world.

Essential:	"Selling the Drama", "Iris", "Horse"
Quintessential:	"I Alone"
Non-Essential:	"T.B.D."
Rating:
Further listening:	Throwing Copper's Rediscovering entry