Live music: better in every way compared to its studio-recorded sibling. But take that 60-minute set you’re thinking of, heat it to 150°C, and press it: you now have a perfectly flat record of your perfectly three-dimensional gig experience. Go one step further. Compress it. All the way down to 320 kilobits per second, yielding you a digital file for you to take with you anywhere you go.

It’ll never yield quite the same experience as that magical night where you could almost see the whites of the eyes of your favourite artist, even hear their fingerprints against the guitar strings – you can’t fit that in a file. And yet, the live album remains a discographic gem of almost indescribable allure. Your favourite artist might yield one, maybe two, if you’re lucky. The live album reanimates some musical archaeologist in us all, eager to catalogue what changes have been made and love them all the more, even if we have to lament our absence at the moment of the musical origin.

“A live album can equally sound like a strange identity-less mix”

Loyle Carner & storytelling with sound

Telling stories – it’s what music does. And something Loyle Carner does expertly on hugo: reimagined (live from the Royal Albert Hall), 2024. Carner, to a five-thousand-strong, wide-eyed and keen-eared audience, prefaces ‘HGU’ with ‘The Cycle’, embarking on a story about refiguring generational trauma. His story of driving lessons with his father in a “VW Polo, right from ’98, dusty red” with a “seatbelt that didn’t really click in”, but just about “road safe, ’cuz he’s not a bad dad” emotionally stupefies when paired alongside ’HGU’s refrains of “I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you.” Throughout the album, Carner cross-stitches evocative anecdotes with his lyrical acts of storytelling, turning each track into a cluster of lived moments that intensify emotional resonance.

But aside from the piano-draped dedications and childhood stories, hugo: reimagined also dazzles as an instrumental feat. The album serves as a gateway drug to Carner’s music for the rap-uninclined, with masterfully anthemic production, unobtrusively wide and perfectly mixed. Collaborating artists like Sampha, JNR Williams, and Jordan Rakei each pull the crisp, well contoured sounds of the studio-recorded source material into the moment and humanise it. One minute, you delight in the humanity of Carner’s lyrics, and the next, you’re shuddering along as Richard Spaven throws himself across the drumkit.

Arctic Monkeys & shifts in sound

But take a gig performed in the same space, four years prior. A live album can equally sound like a strange identity-less mix, straddling the large gap between a band’s shift-in-sound.

“Crowd sound can make or break a live album”

The Arctic Monkeys’ Live at the Royal Albert Hall (2020) sees the band’s musicmaking try and retain the vigour of their earlier albums but inject into it the languorous lounge-ease of Turner’s sci-fi pet project, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino (2018). It works – in places. ‘Do I Wanna Know? ’ is given a much-needed facelift but ‘Four Out Of Five’ doesn’t quite translate onto the Albert’s stage; neither does ‘Brianstorm’, as Turner’s dragging delivery pulls on the reigns of Helders’ fury of drums. Certainly, some tracks shine: ‘Pretty Visitors’ has the magnitude and Californian candour of a San Francisco-threatening earthquake. But there’s another faultline in the Monkeys’ strange 90-minute halfway-house. Much to the vinyl-lovers lament, the mix isn’t quite right. Turner is (albeit rightly) given prominence, undeniably forward, but it sounds as if they’ve exiled Helders’ drums to another continent and given O’Malley a toy bass guitar instead of a real one. It’s almost impossible not to wince as Turner’s lyrical peaks across the album bristle against the microphone.

Portishead & audience additions

Crowd sound can make or break a live album. The Monkeys’ ‘Brianstorm’ is aggravatingly shadowed by the “duh”’s and “dah”’s of an overly eager audience. And it’s the same with Portishead’s Roseland, NYC Live (1998). Against the industrial, irrecoverably trip-hop sounds of the album, the orchestral additions bring elegant angelism to ‘Glory Box’ and undeniable pizzazz to ‘All Mine’. But it’s the crowd that dominates. Whooping and whistling along at every possible moment, it’s impossible to listen to this album without some shred of annoyance. It all culminates in ‘Roads’, which becomes almost unlistenable: shrouded by blood-curdlingly sloppy clapping-along, the audience’s over-eagerness even interrupts Gibbons’ delivery before the song’s end.

“If it’s a debasement to label this a perfectly live album, I’m guilty”

Radiohead & getting it right

With what seems to be becoming an ever-present truism of the music world, “Radiohead did it perfectly back in the 2000s”, it seems that the only answer is their hybrid approach on The King of Limbs – Live from the Basement (2011). While their other live album, I Might Be Wrong (Live), 2001, dazzles with dystopias where muddiness fractures into militant sonic lawlessness, TKOL offers a strange ‘goldilocks zone’ of a live album. The charming vocal editions and little jokes that adorn the periphery both build the imaginative picture of the recording as well as betray its true nature: Yorke’s quip that “this is a run-through, so I guess Jonny can do email at the same time”, and the prompts like “Let’s move on then”, confess that these are live performances, but ones petal-picked from the best of the run-throughs. There’s no audience to associate with, but live kinetic energy remains.

So, it’s not quite live, but maybe it’s better. Floating along on the melancholic chords of ‘Codex’, atomised by the instrumental wash of ‘Staircase’, or even enjoying the recorded tea-break before ‘Seperator’, it’s easier to imaginatively insert yourself here, in the Basement, than in any concert arena or wood-panelled pub. Retaining the artistically capsulised nature of a studio recording but bubbling with incorruptible authenticity, it’s a happy harmony of reliable yet experimentally delightful. If it’s a debasement to label this a perfectly live album, I’m guilty. I think it’s as close as you can get.