Photo of Nick Cave (right) and the Bad Seeds by Megan Cullen
First Thought Fridays is a (mostly) weekly column offering quick-hit takes on some of the albums released this week, serving up first impressions, favorite or least favorite songs, and whether or not they’re worth a second listen. Check back for more each Friday night or Saturday morning.
“Can Olivia Rodrigo Save the Live Album?” That was the breathless headline in a recent issue of Rolling Stone for a brief article about the singer’s Live from Glastonbury (A BBC Recording), released today. The thesis of the article strikes me as preposterous, as the live album isn’t dead, it’s just not the omnipresent thing it grew into where every artist churned out a live album or ten just to bide time between albums or fulfill record label contracts rather than because they caught something really special on tape. Rodrigo isn’t even the only pop star playing the live album game: Dua Lipa’s Live from the Royal Albert Hall, a triumphant hometown concert backed by an orchestra and, for one song, Sir Elton John, just came out last year. (It’s great, go listen to it.)
As if to prove my point, there’s a bevy of great live recordings being released today alongside Rodrigo’s: I cover a couple below, plus DIIV released a new concert movie called Boiled Alive that I haven’t had a chance to check out yet (but you can rent it for yourself for just $5 at boiledalive.com), and our Rob Levy dove into a batch of new Depeche Mode live releases. Plus, hey, I check out some other stuff recorded the boring way, a.k.a. in a studio, including a couple of archival releases that are very much worth your time. Here’s what I listened to this week, in the order in which I listened to ‘em:
Silk Daisys, self-titled (self-released): The dream of the Nineties is alive in the debut full-length from the duo Silk Daisys. The album tackles so many different subgenres and approaches from the alt-rock era (right down to the album artwork that makes it look like a long-lost release from 4AD) and yet somehow they’re so on-point on all of it that you’ll think you’ve tumbled through time and landed on a really great college radio station in the year 1993.
Case in point: “It’s a Laugh” (as in “That’s so funny I forgot to laugh”—as Chandler might say, could you be any more Nineties?) has jangly guitars and chirpy vocals that bring to mind Juliana Hatfield or Letters to Cleo, “Kiss Me Like You Mean It” has a dreamy Wish-era Cure feel to its rhythm section and the spacy atmosphere of Cocteau Twins, “Nervous Wreck” has the swirling beauty of Lush, and “Haunted House” has the cascading rhythms and churning guitars of My Bloody Valentine. I won’t lie, there’s a part of me that thinks this album could use a bit more originality to it, especially when you have a song like “Everybody Wants to Be My Baby,” which is a bouncy lo-fi pop tune that’s like listening to the Lemonheads over a staticky old phone connection—it sounds great, but when the chorus includes the stinger “Everybody wants to be my baby…but you” you realize, hey, Juliana Hatfield already wrote that song in 1992 and it’s called “Everybody Loves Me But You.” But I find it hard to hate on the album because it does sound so good, particularly in the way the guitars shine and shimmer on songs like “Someday” and “That Was Yesterday” better than anybody this side of Johnny Marr. Will I Listen Again?: Yes.
Dove Ellis, Blizzard (Black Butter/AMF Records): The first thing you’ll notice about Irish singer-songwriter Dove Ellis is the voice: on the verses, his natural singing voice has a Thom Yorke quality to it, albeit in more of a laidback way than you’d normally find Yorke. But then as each song builds, Ellis’s voice does too, reaching a quivering falsetto that sounds uncannily like Jeff Buckley without feeling like a put-on. Musically, the songs are unadorned and folk-y, akin to the work of Ellis’ fellow countryman Glen Hansard (with maybe a little Andrew Bird mixed in). He does occasionally mix things up, such as the unexpected button accordion on the jaunty “Jaundice” or “To the Sandals,” where the instruments start to drop out at the bridge and it begins to deconstruct in intriguing ways, aided by stabs of saxophone. Ellis seems to come by the Yorke/Buckley qualities of his voice naturally as the similarities sound unforced, other than the slightly labored-sounding closing track “Away You Stride.” Will I Listen Again?: Yes.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Live God (Play It Again Sam): One of the things the big live albums of the Seventies (KISS Alive, Cheap Trick At Budokan, Frampton Comes Alive) accomplished was serving as an introduction to a band you’ve overlooked, distilling all of an artist’s greatest songs and biggest strengths into one document amplified by the energy of the live audience. If you, like me, have kind of slept on Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, this may be the album that will wake you up and grab your attention. It certainly worked on me.
A tour souvenir to preview the band’s upcoming Australia tour, Live God captures a Paris show on Cave’s tour for last year’s Wild God, with a setlist that spans his years with the Bad Seeds—8 of Wild God’s 10 tracks make an appearance, plus songs dating from 1984, 1985, 1992, 1994, 1997, 2004, 2016, and 2019 as well as a pair of tracks from his 2021 duo album Carnage with Bad Seeds violinist Warren Ellis. I enjoyed Wild God quite a bit, but the performances felt a little overly mannered to me. In the context of a concert, the tunes have a different energy—they just feel more alive. Cave expertly shifts that energy level up and down, starting at a high that peaks with the raucous, barely controlled chaos of “From Her to Eternity” before slowing down for the piano ballad “Long Dark Night,” a real weeper. “Tupelo” is a highlight, slowing the set down to a simmer before suddenly, powerfully boiling over—holy cow, is it good. The appreciative Paris crowd really gets into it with “Red Right Hand,” while “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” is agitated, loud, and rockin’, right down to the “Sympathy for the Devil-style “woo-woos.”
Throughout it all, Cave is impeccably backed by the Bad Seeds: violinist Warren Ellis, drummer Jim Sclavunos, guitarist George Vjestica, and current touring members multi-instrumentalist Larry Mullins, keyboardist Carly Paradis, and recent addition Colin Greenwood of Radiohead on bass. The way the band can wind down to give Cave’s voice and piano space only to swell and explode the songs at just the right moments is impeccable. They provide the ultimate support to a songwriter at the top of his game giving the performance of a lifetime. What a fantastic document of a phenomenal show. Will I Listen Again?: Definitely.
Mercyland, self-titled (Propeller Sound Recordings): Before he was the bassist in Bob Mould’s band Sugar or the Drive-By Truckers’ go-to producer, David Barbe led a fantastic pop-punk power trio named Mercyland. The Athens, Georgia-based band never got their due during their 1985 to 1991 heyday, with many of their recordings never seeing wide release (even their farewell album was stuck in the vault for decades), save for a long out-of-print compilation called Spillage put out by Rykodisc back in 1994 to capitalize on Sugar’s popularity. But Propeller Sound Recordings came to the rescue in 2023, remastering and reissuing the band’s lone original album No Feet on the Cowling and previously unreleased swan song We Never Lost a Single Game.
With this self-titled release, Propeller now finishes clearing out the vaults with a collection of the band’s earliest recordings from 1985 through 1987. While lesser known today than many of their peers, Mercyland was on par with, and obviously in conversation with, the punk bands of their day: you can hear the lightning fast pop-punk of Descendents in “Amerigod,” ”Black on Black on Black” has the ramshackle feel of early Replacements, the highlight “Fall of the City” plays like the Clash at triple time, and “Radio Thieves” has echoes of the punky pre-fame days of Soul Asylum and Goo Goo Dolls. And yet, Mercyland doesn’t exactly sound like any of those bands, they sound like themselves: raucous punk rock played with boundless energy, hearts on sleeves, and tempos as fast as possible. A rare gem that I’m eternally thankful to Propeller for unearthing. Will I Listen Again?: Absolutely.
(To go with this column’s theme: none of these songs were recorded live, but Barbe did release a live EP back in September called Any Better and It Would Be Worse that dropped just in time for him to sell copies at Off Broadway when he opened for Bob Mould. Recorded live solo with just Barbe’s voice, guitar, and a loop board, it has a very different sound than Mercyland, with more measured tempos and spacier instrumentation, but is also worth a spin.)
Sloan, B Sides Win Vol. 3: 2003–2011 (Murderrecords): Issued on vinyl back in May but just released for digital purchase via Bandcamp on Friday, this third rarities compilation from the four-singer/four-songwriter Canadian power pop titans covers B-sides and foreign edition bonus tracks from the middle third of the band’s career (so far, of course…they’re still an ongoing concern, and just dropped a new album in September). Highlights include Jay Ferguson’s groovy “Step On It, Jean” (a bonus track on the American edition of 2003’s dinosaur rock-influenced Action Pact that’s better than almost anything on the album proper) and haunting “I Thought That I Was Ready For You,” and Patrick Pentland’s heartbroken ballad “Even Though” and mid-tempo jangler “The Best Part of Your Life” (both a nice counterpoint to the strutting rockers Pentland mostly wrote during this period). Chris Murphy offers up the best in show, though, with “Try to Make It,” a song that takes the best part of every Cars song, smooshes them together, and adds a layer of good-hearted misanthropy as he sings about the joys and regrets of canceling plans with your friends (because who hasn’t been there, amiright?). Given its nature as an odds-n-sods collection, this obviously doesn’t have the ebb and flow of a proper Sloan LP (not to mention there aren’t any songs from drummer Andrew Scott on it), but its peaks are easily at the same heights as the band’s very best. Will I Listen Again?: Absolutely.
I’m With Her, Songs from the Stage: Kansas City (Rounder Records): Singer-songwriters Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O’Donovan first teamed up as I’m With Her back in 2018 and snagged two Grammy noms and one win for their trouble, but it wasn’t until earlier this year that the trio finally reunited. This column didn’t exist when Wild and Clear and Blue dropped back in May, so let me just say in brief that it’s a fantastic slice of vocal harmony-driven Americana and it has a decent chance of being on my top 25 albums of 2025 list.
Songs from the Stage: Kansas City is a new three-song live EP featuring three cuts from the new album, and they somehow manage to sound even better live. Each song is just three voices and three acoustic instruments (guitars, violin, mandolin), but when those three perfectly complementary voices lock in together, it’s as warm and uplifting as music gets. The most dynamic track of the three is “Sisters of the Night Watch,” which opens with the three voices linking up a cappella and rides gentle, folky vibes but builds to a cathartic wail of a bridge. Now I’m really kicking myself for not seeing them at The Pageant back in June. Here’s hoping the next wait is shorter than 7 years. Will I Listen Again?: Yes.
Olivia Rodrigo, Live from Glastonbury (A BBC Recording) (Geffen): A certain demographic of music fan loves to lament about the death of rock music, yet those same people refuse to claim Olivia Rodrigo for what she clearly—clearly—is: a rock star. The term “pop star” is deployed like an epithet: she’s a girl! She records under her own name, not a band name! She acted in Disney TV shows! That’s not rock n’ roll!
One listen to her victory lap headlining set at Glastonbury should be enough to silence the haters. (Not that it will—as one of Rodrigo’s contemporaries might say, haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate.) She’s got rock n’ roll energy and fuck-you attitude to spare—and hell, there’s even plenty of legit rippin’ guitar solos tossed around throughout this thing. Rodrigo seems genuinely incredulous that her career has taken her to the point where she can headline a festival in front of 200,000 people (a genuinely absurd number), but she brings the goods with a strong performance backed by a crack all-female band. She takes full advantage by staying mostly in full-on rock mode, from opener “obsessed” through highlights “bad idea right?”, “so american,” a Weezeresque run through “all-american bitch,” and the wailing show closer “get him back.” But she also knows when to dial it down, deploying ballads from her first album like “driver’s license” and “traitor” that find the emphatic crowd screaming along to the lyrics. Another powerful example of the latter is “enough for you,” just Rodrigo and her electric guitar as she bares her soul in front of a couple hundred thousand people. And then, of course, there’s the most attention-grabbing portion of the show, where Rodrigo is joined by Robert Smith to cover The Cure classics “Friday I’m in Love” and “Just Like Heaven.” The former is particularly well-executed, with Smith and Rodrigo trading verses and harmonizing beautifully.
The set is such a triumphant rock star move, such a powerful, dynamic, and richly varied performance, that it bears a reminder: Rodrigo only has two albums under her belt. The potential for where she could go from here is mind-boggling. This album feels like the coronation for her imperial phase. Will I Listen Again?: Absolutely.
Bonus track: Leona Naess, “Stop Chasing People” (self-released): I’m not going to get into the habit of writing up singles in this column because that way madness lies, but since my Apple Music replay revealed to me this week that Leona Naess was far and away my most streamed artist of 2025, I’d be remiss in not mentioning that she dropped a new single this week, and that it’s pretty great. Since dropping her big comeback album Brood X in 2022 after a 17-year break (my #5 album of that year), Naess has stuck to only putting out standalone singles whenever the mood strikes her. None of the singles have quite grabbed me as much as Brood X did, but “Stop Chasing People” has a sprightlier tempo and a chorus guaranteed to stick in your brain in a most pleasant fashion, making it my favorite of the batch. Give it a spin!
Advance warning, next week’s column will probably be my last one of the year as I start diving into preparation for Year End List Season. See you then! | Jason Green
