Here's my quandary with live albums: the prototypical one selects live favorites-- sometimes from one show, sometimes from multiple shows-- along with a couple of obscure numbers, and one or two covers in the middle to give it the appearance of having more diversity than your garden-variety singles collection. So what's a reviewer to do? He can't grade the songwriting; that's already been done.

Basically, a reviewer judges your traditional live record based on gaps. For instance: what gaps are filled that might have been missing in the original recording? What gaps have been created by thrusting the song into a more primitive live setting? I mean, bands can easily be made to sound like competent musicians thanks to recording software, but it's harder to manipulate that stuff for live albums, which often reveals the gaps in a band's abilities. Of course, bands don't generally decide to pick one of their off nights to release as a live album. And yes, there's the gap between studio quality recordings and live recordings, whether it be crisp and vital, or muddy and dull.

The Apples in Stereo are new to the live album game. Not like I'm surprised-- it's never seemed like a necessity for these studio-oriented kids. Available as an MP3-only release through eMusic, Live in Chicago is a prototypical live affair that feels somehow dissimilar from the rest. It sounds like an audience member's well-made DAT recording. It emanates authenticity and innocence, like a band proudly and generously offering a tape of their first good gig. "You can actually hear the vocals very well over the noise," says leadman and Elephant 6 deity Robert Schneider. "This is the first time one of our live recordings accomplished this." Rarely has an indie icon sounded so earnest.

Still, it's time to judge the gaps. First off, on these eight Apples originals and one Beach Boys cover, Schneider and the band sound like they're having a blast, and the energy is instantly detectable. You can sense it in moments like when Schneider breaks into jubilant faux-Van Morrison shouting at the end of "Ruby", originally from 1999's Her Wallpaper Reverie. Or when the band crashes into the hyper-jam guitar solo instrumental bridge on "Go", off last year's The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone. It's hard to help imagining how much better it all would have sounded if you'd been there. But you take what you can get.

As for what's missing in arrangements and/or production, the Apples usually compensate. On "Dots 1, 2, 3", the Apples' most driving and least characteristic track to date (culled from their 1995 landmark Fun Trick Noisemaker), the noisy electronic opener of the original is well interpreted with simple stuttering guitars. And in the case of "Go", they compensate by not compensating: the horn section and heavy drums on the studio version had always been the extra weight that pushed the song over the line from fun to annoying; with this live version, the band sounds nimble and spontaneous, unfettered by such distractions.

And then there's their take on the Beach Boys's "Heroes and Villains". Unfortunately, the straightforward Apples treatment doesn't really translate effectively to tape, even if it would have been a pleasant surprise in person. Still, the gaps between Smile-era Beach Boys and Robert Schneider are large, to say the very least that could possibly be said. But they get points for covering an honest-to-god great song, and their effective segue from the lost Wilson-penned classic into one of their finest tracks, the melancholy "Get There Fine", off 1997's Tone Soul Evolution.

Live in Chicago has the charm of a well-recorded audience bootleg sanctioned by the group on one of their best nights. It falls flat at times, but rarely; the energy of pretending to be in the audience watching Schneider and his bandmates jam through a few well-crafted pop tunes just can't be denied. Enough gaps are even filled to warrant a recommendation. And as the reviewer, I must say, as prototypical live albums go, it turned out to be relatively painless. So there.

-Spencer Owen, March, 2001