This isn’t the exception here: it’s the rule. On a Cabaret Voltaire album, you begin not knowing where you are or where you’re being taken, and though you do feel yourself going somewhere, by the end you’re no clearer about your position than you were at the beginning. Hearing them do this in vivo raises goosebumps, and to have an album whose creators had the restraint to just leave well enough alone and let the performance speak for itself -- well, it means something. It means that a “good live album” isn’t an oxymoron and is in fact an excitingly real possibility. It means that there’s no reason current good bands like Clem Snide or Destroyer or Fly Ashtray couldn’t make a great live album, too, if they just took the austere and mysterious approach pioneered by a couple of guys from Sheffield. When we all stand before our maker, the ten million bands who didn’t heed the example of Hai! will have some ‘splaining to do. The rest of us will be over by the punchbowl, eavesdropping on God berating Tesla and dancing to an audiophile pressing of Hai! spinning on the Universe’s Heaviest Deck. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 [home]