Live: The Distance To Here

The Pennsylvania band Live forces its audience to make a harsh trade-off: In exchange for urgently hooky, compellingly bombastic, larger-than-life rock songs like "Run To The Water," you have to endure lyrics like, "Oh, desert, speak to my heart / oh, woman of the earth /maker of children who weep for love / maker of this birth." Not since 1994's Throwing Copper has Live produced songs this sharp and catchy, and not since 1997's Secret Samadhi has Live sounded so insufferably wheezy and self-important. Ed Kowalczyk still huffs and puffs as if he were singing while nailed to a cross, but the songs themselves blow away the turgid output of comparably overblown bands from Creed on. That's not exactly a rave, but it's got to be good for something. Success hasn't been kind to Live—just listen to Kowalczyk suffer the perils of fame on Samadhi—but the reason has as much to do with familiarity breeding contempt as anything else. After all, who would you rather hear wailing about God, the children, the desert, and the dolphins: a struggling rocker with a heartfelt agenda, or a millionaire rocker with a God complex That millionaire rocker with a God complex has surely been inside Kowalczyk since his days as a struggling rocker with a heartfelt agenda, so why resent him for indulging those impulses now that he has a chance Besides, The Distance To Here could be a lot, lot worse, as evidenced by Creed's new Human Clay.