From attending shows for bands you have been a lifelong fan of, to being dragged along by friends to see an artist you have never heard of—you may have found yourself stunned and amazed by some band’s live performance. After the show, you go home and listen to their songs again and wonder if this band is underrated because people don’t attend their shows.
Some artists are born to feed off the crowd’s energy, which gives the impression that they perform better live. With adrenaline pumping, they are able to give a raw explosive performance. If you take the band out of this environment and into a sound-proofed recording studio, you’ll realize things are very different. Perhaps another reason is listeners cannot visually see the body language with the recorded audio. Sight is one of our key senses and main receptors to stimulate the mind, so the charisma of the artist is simply lost in the audio. Amongst peers, we debated about the idea of tracks that have been written in ways so that it is optimized for live performances. Some examples include: lyrics or sounds which encourage fan engagement such as clapping, chanting, or even heavy breakdowns for moshing and head-banging. Ultimately, it’s most likely that some bands are just more comfortable on stage and perform better live because of this.
Personally, I have only experienced this a handful of times, but one performance which truly sticks in my mind is RADWIMPS who played in London last year. The ability of the front-man to control his audience as though they were wrapped around his pinky was absolutely amazing. The other example which is not rock, was the Final Fantasy Distant Worlds Orchestra at the Albert Hall in London a few years ago. I was in complete awe and was astonished greatly by the perfection of how the sounds in real-life were ironically “record-perfect” and wondered if that is why people loved classical music in the past.
This interesting question was sparked by a question on Reddit and we decided to bring on a discussion here to see if readers have experienced anything similar. Please leave your comments in this post below, comment on our Facebook post or tweet to @JROCK_NEWS.