With Strings: Live at Town Hall

by

Eels

Edit

I attended the Portland show of the 2006 "With Strings" tour last summer and this album is a faithful recording of what I heard. No disappointment here! If you like the Eels, you will love this album. However, be warned that the sound is more "raw" than their studio albums. This is not due to bad mastering as some have suggested, this is how they sounded in concert.

I hope that Mr. E releases a live album of the 2006 "No Strings Attached" tour. I saw them last night at the Roseland in Portland, OR and wow! what a difference. They played a few of the same songs like My Beloved Monster, Railroad Man, Mr. E's Beautiful Blues, The Only Thing I Care About, Dirty Girl, I like Birds, I'm Going to Stop Pretending and Hey Man, but this time it was a rock show. Everyone was dressed as if they were members of Motorhead and they played fast and hard.

Aye, this has some great new twist to some of the best songs off of the eels newest album " blinking lights and revolutions" and some other great bits from prior albums... Yet, theres some obvious flaws of this live recording....Which is too bad because I assume since this is a "unique" live show for a rare varients of songs that the recording quality and mastering would end up on a sub par leval.... Sure Mr E may falter on a song or two but, hey no live lp has ever been perfect from the singer to musicians but, they can still rock overall so to speak... Here theres some obvious bad quality control at points... Like one reviewer said over loud vocal mixing and I noticed on some tracks theres that weird loud silent sound....I havn't heard that odd sound since the mid eighties.... I'm not a technician sound board reader but, I know it has something to do with the odd mixing of the live recording to final master taping or in this era I suppose this was transfered to digital audio which may also, be where some of this odd sound comes from.... Yet, it's not a total throw away....No, by far this is great for the unique twist of classic songs that one loves by Mr E and the Eels and it's overall quite listenable. Just sad to see it has some audio troubles since in this day and age it's avoidable from the live recording to the mixing to the master recording.....