Live albums are typically one of the crassest moves available to a band and their record label. Cheap to produce, they’re usually tossed off to meet a contractual obligation, or as a money-spinner or as a stopgap. They work because fans love them. If you really like a band, a live album is a way of having more of the same but a little different; a type of consumer desire that has never failed to excite people in the business of selling music. So these things have a habit of getting made and while almost never as satisfying as albums proper, they can, on occasion, be entertaining and informative documents in and of themselves.

The case I’ll make here in favour of Live At The Troubadour by Brisbane rock band Giants of Science is a fairly straight-forward one: (a) It has a story (b) It sounds good. Thus their album manages to tick both boxes mentioned, it rocks and it tells me something new about a band I already like.

Here is the story part. After completing their 2005 album Here Is The Punishment and spending a few years promoting it, Giants of Science split up. It was the usual bullshit: personal disagreements and years of touring without much in return. People went overseas, people went to the suburbs and forgot about music and people started other bands. I was pretty sure they were never going to get back together. It didn’t worry me, I figured they’d danced their dance just like I’d danced mine (just like your friends probably have too). I was the end one would expect, but the band members had been friends (and music obsessives) since high school and when the friendships were later repaired the band got back together too. Live At The Troubadour is a document of their comeback show.

What could have been understandably jittery and tentative ends up sounding extraordinarily cohesive. As former manager Steve Bell notes in the booklet, they always were an accomplished live band, even while trashed, but here they sound, for want of a better phrase, more controlled. It works. Less reliant on swagger and chops and piss-fuelled melodrama, they impress with something I felt was often lost in their mythology: the fact that they write fucking great stoner rock jams. From the blazing bridge of ‘Window Seat’ through to the Budd cum Black Sabbath of new track ‘WFRC’, they take no chances with the set list. It’s all the good stuff mixed and recorded by long-time sound tech Murray Paas. It sounds crisp, big and dynamic and – to my ears - the production is a marked improvement on that found on their last studio album.

Ultimately, what emerges out of all this is a snapshot of a band with a newfound sense of itself. If the live album is of any cultural use at all, it’s as a microscope, something that lets people really listen in hard to the details lost or forgotten in the rush and clang of a live show. In the long-term, rock bands rise and fall by the songs they write and whether they can deliver them in the live setting. As such it’s genuinely exciting to listen to Giants of Science finally getting out of the way of their songs here.

by Ian Rogers