Being in the business since, oh, 1980 is both a blessing and a challenge. On the one hand, you’ve got lots of great material to compile a set list with. On the other, what gets left in, and what gets left out?
No such issue faces post-Punk/Folk mutants New Model Army, as their new live album A Night of A Thousand Voices (Attack Attack Records) shows. Mainly because it stretches to two discs’ worth of material. “We’re going through it in alphabetical order”, commands lead singer Justin Sullivan at the start of the album. The band’s faithful, amassed at the Round Chapel one weekend in April 2018 (when this was recorded), all fall into line.
What’s different here, however, is given away by the album’s title. New Model Army doesn’t just sing that massive catalogue of hits, but so does the audience, with Sullivan as choirmaster and the band as… the orchestra?
This sounds like a recipe for disaster, but it works surprisingly well. The crowd gives it a proper go and pumps each song full of energy and passion. Take ‘Those Words’ or ‘A Liberal Education’, which seem to throb with power care of the hive jive.
As experiments go, then, this does work very well, up to a point. Live albums, of course, can at times make more sense than the studio material does. Here, however, it is more a tribute to the strength of New Model Army’s back catalogue that it all sounds good even when scores of not-quite tuneful punters bellow it out. As a visceral celebration of the band and its work, the album is a great success.
But let’s strike a note of caution here. In capturing that vibe, that collective joy, the live album has to pay a price. You get all the hits, of course, but it’s revealing that the mix job on the album has to ‘move’ the instrumentals into the foreground and the vocals (so many vocals) into the background. Of course, a bootleg of the gigs would have sounded like total chaos, an injustice to both the band and the experience on those nights.
But it still means the real conflict here, between the voice of the crowd and the sound of the band, is never quite resolved. A certain tension results, which strikes a jarring note throughout the album. The third disc, a DVD of choice cuts from the gigs, has less trouble. But live DVDs are an established format. The album proper has all the faltering steps of something new, but still not quite defined.
You could argue, of course, that the album isn’t about the band or the audience, but both, yet it never quite resolves that conflict. That said, nothing ventured… And you can hardly accuse the band of coasting on past glories here. Better a thousand voices are heard than none.
7 / 10
ALEXANDER HAY