Extreme Take Us Alive
by Alissa Ordabai
Staff Writer
Hitting the road after a 13-year hiatus must have felt like a big adventure for Extreme, and this album captures the experience with plenty of detailed panache. It is moving to hear Extreme play live without the weight of history on their backs, and to feel the electricity between the band and the audience, which knows all the words and holds its breath for every sparkle of Nuno Bettencourt’s fretboard fireworks.
While Extreme have been relying on their devoted fan base throughout this mammoth 75-city tour, you can guess that new fans have also been recruited every night. After all, who can resist the immediately gratifying infectious riffs and the sheets-of-flame solos of the likes of “Decadence Dance” and “Comfortably Dumb” or the touching lyricism of “Ghost”?
All-time classics side by side with the new material from the 2008 record Saudades de Rock make for a good mix, showing that contrasts and juxtapositions – between the old and the new, the epic and the subtle, the simple and the complex – is exactly what’s needed to emphasize the band’s pedigree on a comeback tour.
While many bands of their generation find it hard these days to project their essence in live situations, this album finds Extreme in top form, and not just instrumentally. There is a lot of insight and reserved savvy to Bettencourt’s spare, subtle virtuosity, to the laser-like intensity of his complex solos, and to the deeply textured, richly detailed sound of the band interacting with each other in perfect synch.
One telling thing you hear Bettencourt say between the songs is that “Rock’n’roll is not dead but it’s sure sick.” Far from being a spontaneously made up catchphrase, it is a feeling which drove Bettencourt throughout his career, a belief that always made him look for new ways to make rock better – be it injecting it with funk, wrapping it around breathtaking melodies, or simply stripping it down to its basic elements. Anything which would take the genre away from the comfortable grooves and the clichés it was settling into a bit too snuggly at the time when Extreme first formed.
Twenty-five years on, and the band’s vision is just as convincing as it ever was. The testimony is this record – fresh, infectious, intelligent and full of things that still surprise you despite some of them being written two decades ago. It resonates with our time, uniting the traditional and the progressive, and at the same time shows that emotional truth can co-exist with originality – a difficult feat to achieve at the time when truths become more and more clichéd and originality demands greater courage. But then again Extreme – one of the most original voices in rock – has always been about this precise combination – depth of feeling side by side with invention.
Label: Frontiers Records
1. Decadence Dance
2. Comfortably Dumb
3. Rest in Peace
4. It’s a Monster
5. Star
6. Tell Me Something I Don’t Know
7. Medley (Kid Ego, Little Girls, Teacher’s Pet)
8. Play With Me
9. Midnight Express
10. More Than Words
11. Ghost
12. Cupid’s Dead
13. Take Us Alive
14. Flight of the Wounded Bumblebee
15. Get the Funk Out
16. Am I Ever Gonna Change
17. Hole Hearted
Hardrock Haven Rating: 8/10