Sometimes a band captures lightning in a bottle and that's what Life Without Buildings did when they were going around back in the early 2000s through a bunch of singles and a sole long player. And, happily, this live album, released in 2007 but recorded in 2002 (soon before they broke up) is a cracker, the guitars ringing resonantly out and Sue Tompkins' sung-spoken declaratory repetitions of words and phrases only loosely attached to their regular meanings coming across clearly; they do a barnstorming job with all of those brilliant numbers from that one studio album of theirs, Any Other City - "PS Exclusive", "Juno", "The Leanover", "New Town" (aka 'the looking in your eyes song'), "Sorrow" - and a handful of others (though, of those, I actually would take the studio version of "Love Trinity" - which is probably my favourite, along with "New Town", from the band's small output of songs), interspersed with genuine-sounding enthusiastic stage banter in Tompkins' Glaswegian accent. One a bit from the past, and more a footnote in my own musical story than anything else, but still, pretty great.
