![]() If I am in the right mood, it's brilliant, a great soaring anthem about death and rebirth. Then there's the reason I bought the CD in the first place, Lightning Crashes. The others, while certainly listenable, basically fall into basic categories of "fast one" or "slow one." Of the songs that didn't make a memory the first time around, I like Waitress, with its clever double meaning in the phrase, " Everybody's good enough for some change." Iris is a good rocker but there's a bit of an ick factor to the lyrics. I Alone, while a good air puncher, still gives me creepy Charles Manson vibes. The other singles like Selling the Drama and All Over You came back to me pretty quick and are still enjoyable. We sure liked to cram those CDs full! While I don't feel like I've been missing out all these years, I generally liked it. ![]() Listening to it now, I'm not sure that I ever made it through the full album. Then the next greatest song of all time came along and I traded in the CD. Mike Canoe: I bought Live's Throwing Copper in early 1995 on the strength of the third single Lightning Crashes, which, for a moment there, I thought was the greatest song of all time. There are a couple that were not singles that I will play when I have the CD out. I don’t often want to listen to the songs that were released as singles. Ken Jackson: One of the hundreds of CDs in my collection but seldom played these days. Throwing Copper stands as the career defining statement for Live. Live would never be this good again, although on their next effort, 1997's Secret Samadhi, they made a mighty effort. Over the course of the album this emotion crests, leading to the expletive filled restaurant tirade Waitress, and the stereotype-filled White, Discussion in which the titular argument breaks down, resulting in the final line, sneered mockingly by vocalist Ed Kowalczyk, " Look where all this talking got us baby!"Ī consistently solid album, good at it's narmiest, bordering on brilliant at its best moments. Creatively Live's reach consistently exceeded their grasp, which kept them honest artistically and led to some very interesting musical choices, such as the final riff in Selling the Drama, which does not resolve, leaving the listener in a state of anxious anticipation. The semi-religious-sounding lyrics don't stand up to scrutiny in places, but when they do work, such as with the singles I Alone and Lightning Crashes, they are powerfully evocative and thought provoking. They beat the sophomore slump here, bettering the debut. James Doughty: A band with a sound that really cut through on the radio. In essence, Throwing Copper is as quintessential of a '90s album as Nevermind, The Chronic or OK Computer, but in a different way: Throwing Copper sounded new, fresh and vital, while sounding utterly familiar - much like the majority of music that tried to pass as alternative." ( Daily Vault) The anthemic songs on Throwing Copper were songs U2 were doing in the early '80s. Live didn't do anything terribly new or groundbreaking. "1994 wasn't as golden of a year as aging Gen-Xers paint it. The singles churned, charged, and soared as well as anything on MTV at the time, and they’ll settle in just fine as classic rock staples for Generation X." ( Stereogum) But they didn’t sell 8 million copies on the strength of Kowalczyk’s rat tail. "It is easy to poke fun at Live, same as any Clinton-era curiosity, and they certainly contributed to a regrettable trajectory for alt-rock radio. They also eased up a bit on the Eastern philosophy the result is a more cohesive, memorable record overall, and quite an improvement from the sometimes overly precious Mental Jewellery." ( AllMusic) "On Throwing Copper, Live tightened their sound, added crashing crescendos for dramatic effect, and injected some anger into their sound and songwriting. In the days that followed the Oklahoma bombing, a local radio station began to air a version of Lightning Crashes that mixed the original song with samples from news reports that emerged after the tragedy. Released shortly after Kurt Cobain's death in April 1994, it sold steadily, received a boost when the band played Woodstock that September, and then another later that month, in the most tragic of circumstances. ![]() The album was written recorded in Pachyderm Studios in rural Minnesota, where Soul Asylum, The Jayhawks and Nirvana had recorded. “We were this band from a small town in Pennsylvania with big guitars that pushed into this universal, spiritual place that wasn’t necessarily safe ground for a rock’n’roll band. “We took our own road,” Kowalczyk told us. It rode the alt.rock wave, but rejected the drug-fuelled nihilism and weaponised irony of grunge in favour of deeply rooted spirituality and relentless self-questioning that owed more to U2 and R.E.M. Produced by Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison, Throwing Copper was a kind of beacon amid the seismic musical and cultural upheavals of the early 90s.
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