Living Colour: CBGB OMFUG Masters: August 19, 2005 The Bowery Collection Review

For those who don’t know Living Colour, think Bad Brains, and swap the punk for hard rock. Oh, you don’t know who the Bad Brains are either? Well I guess I should have figured that if you don’t know one, you probably wouldn’t know the other. Well to put it simply, they are an all African American band which fuses hard rock, funk, rap, punk, jazz, and whatever else you could think of. While rising to fame, the band was a regular at the historic CBGB, and luckily, their final performance at the late club was captured here.

One of the major reasons people buy live albums is to get the feeling like they were there. To hear the roar of the crowd as the band walks on stage, and to hear all the chatter in between songs. Unfortunately that’s an aspect which is edited out far too much on live albums today. We get snippets from different shows smashed together with the facade of a live album, when it’s really nothing more than a rawer studio album. Living Colour held their end of the bargain and delivered a straight forward live album with all the banter, roaring, and rawness of the actual event. The performance was taken directly from the sound board. The quality is far from stunning, but we should never expect much more from a pure and raw experience. Sometimes it’s the unpolished sound which makes a live album feel that much greater.

This recording captures all the exuberance and passion of a Living Colour performance. The songs are loud and brash, and demand your absolute attention with all the intriguing social commentary delivered in each of their songs. Highlights of the show are "Open Letter to Landlord", "Terrorism" and of course, "Cult of Personality". Living Colour may be nothing more than a blip in rock history, but their talent goes sadly overlooked, and after hearing this performance, I wish I could have been there.

Grade: B