 Indigo Girls This confusingly-titled and arbitrarily-packaged CD is an almost prototypical bootleg: decent-quality audience recording of a good show, and featuring all sorts of errors in the information on the tray card. Though it does bear a UPC barcode that makes it look more like a questionable import than an outright bootleg, I-Girls fans will no doubt scratch their heads at titles like "Gallies" and "Closer to Me" in the track listing: they meant "Galileo" and "Closer to Fine," of course. And the cover shot of a backwoods Appalachian couple playing a fiddle and a guitar on their front porch is just plain odd. Even so, this is well worth checking out for fans, as the live I-Girls experience is always damn good and quite often earth-shattering. This particular show is an all-acoustic, Amy-and-Emily-only gig at Radio City Music Hall, June 28, 1994, early in the tour for Swamp Ophelia. This was around the time I started to drift away from the Girls, though listening to this it's apparent that the new material at the time was easily on par with the classic stuff I loved from them. From what I can gather, this was actually the first Indigo Girls boot to hit the market. The material has apparently been issued on other discs with varying track listings, but I don't think the whole show has been released in one coherent package. This CD, certainly, is not that coherent: for example, "The Wood Song," listed as the opening track, does not appear at all, while the great "Center Stage," unlisted, does. And the cuts between tracks are a little jarring. But the magic of Amy & Emily's shows without the full-band backing is always awesome. This really takes me back to when I would catch them every time they came through town. Some of the best shows I've ever seen, and I truly miss 'em now that Mom's permanently grounded me for killing Dad. I tried using the old "Oedipal rage" excuse but she just told me to go to my room. The Girls are joined by members of Big Fish Ensemble on a couple tracks ("This Train Revised" and "Kid Fears"), and Kristen Hall on a cover of Neil Young's "Southern Man." The performances and harmonies, as always, are flawless. The sound is fair. Overall, not an essential boot, but fans will no doubt enjoy it. This is one band where you don't mind the audience screaming, because they literally can't help it – that's how religious an experience an I-Girls concert can be if it catches you in the right frame of mind. Here's the real track listing, for the record: World Falls/Virginia Woolf/Dead Man's Hill/Power of Two/Reunion/Language Or the Kiss/Center Stage/Least Complicated/This Train Revised/Ghost/Kid Fears/Galileo/Southern Man/Closer to Fine
Review by Dave L. Röth |