Lagwagon – Live In A Dive

Fat Wreck Chords are back with their seventh installment in their famed Live In A Dive series. In regular fashion they have capture one of their bands in a live setting (this time in Hollywood) and recorded it and produced it perfectly and topped it all off with an original comic strip as the booklet. This time Fat Wreck took one of their roster’s most popular bands: Lagwagon. And if these twenty-two tracks show anything, it is that even after well over a decade of doing shows, they still know how to put on a good show.

Throughout the album Lagwagon plays select songs from most of their catalog all the way from their 1992 release Duh (Beer Goggles) up to their latest 2003 release Blaze (Falling Apart and Never Stops) – giving you a feel for their entire career. It even features two new songs, one 40 second shouter called Mister Bap and The Chemist (which is much more like the classic Lagwagon that we know). Joey Cape’s vocals are strong and melodic, sounding exactly like their do on the recordings and you can easily hear the excitement of the crowd. They talk enough in between the songs to remind you that its a live album, but not so much so that it slows down the listen in any way.

The crowd really gets into certain songs, especially ones like Alien 8, Violins, Beer Goggles, and Razor Burn; especially when Joey Cape asks the crowd to sing along for the final section of Razor Burn. The sound quality is good, its polished enough to be loud and clear but raw enough to know that its not all computerized.

Lagwagon‘s Live In A Dive album is good live album, no more, no less. It gives a nice run down of the career of one of Fat Wreck Chords‘s most famed bands and makes you want to listen to their old albums again. And that is what a live album should do – it should incite the need to listen to the band some more, and Lagwagon are able to do that here. If you are a hardcore Lagwagon fan then this is for you. If you like live albums, then this won’t disappoint either; but if you’re only a casual fan, then this won’t open many new doors concerning the band and you might as well skip it.