Live: Songs From Black Mountain : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

You gotta hand it to live for sticking to their guns. Long after Creed and other irony-deficient Nineties rock acts hung it up or changed their stripes, Live have stubbornly stayed true to their original sound and have managed to actually maintain an active fan base -- particularly in Europe, where they remain huge. The problem is that now, on their seventh album, singer and primary songwriter Ed Kowalczyk is revisiting themes (Eastern religion, the futility of war and Kowalczyk's love for his wife and daughters) he's been mining for years. The band's signature sound of slowly rising choruses punctuated by Kowalczyk's rumbling wail has also grown quite stale. "Home," the only topical song on the album, is perhaps the most inoffensive anti-war song ever written: It channels a grieving wife actually crying, "Politics aside, what I'd give to have him here tonight."