On December 13th, 2019 Stone Sour will release their very first live album Stone Sour: Hello, You Bastards, Live in Reno via Cooking Vinyl. I will admit I was completely surprised when I realized this was the first live album from the band. So many bands these days release a live version of almost every album they release.
One other completely different thing about this live album is the very raw quality of it. There isn’t a lot of messing around with the sound to make everything perfect and sound like it was recorded in the studio. You really feel like you were there that crazy October night in 2018. There is a good reason for this per guitarist Josh Rand via The Metal Sucks Podcast recently:
“Actually, it all started out with the initial plan was for us to record on the Russian tour, and the equipment came in a couple of days early,” he said (hear audio below). “Our TM [tour manager]/front-of-house guy ended up hooking it up, just wanted to test run it at the Reno show, didn’t tell any of us and he recorded the show. The next day he’s, like, ‘Hey, guys. I recorded last night’s show. Check it out.’ We’re, like, ‘Yeah…’ We listened to it back and we were all pretty stoked with the performance of everything. We had no idea, so we didn’t have that pressure of, ‘We’re recording’ or anything. The way that it sounded is exactly like what you hear. We just decided we should put this out and not do anything to it — leave it exactly like it is, one-hundred percent raw and live with no overdubs or anything. We just tried to figure out things to do for our fans on the downtime while Corey [Taylor, vocals] is in SLIPKNOT. In the past, we did the cover records, this time around we decided to do the live record.”
I can’t give these guys enough credit for going that route. I am such a fan of the feeling a live show can create in a person and a lot of times that feeling can get lost in a live album.
The setlist is an incredible mix of Stone Sour’s catalog. As Lead singer Corey Taylor points out, “Bother” is probably the song that was most people’s 1st taste of Stone Sour back in 2006. And if you are anything like me it was love at first listen. Stone Sour has perfected the art of mixing the softer and harder side of rock in my opinion, with songs like “30-30-150” being on the harder end of the spectrum. We get the best of the headbanging, mosh-pit world, mixed with the most haunting ballads thanks to Taylor’s out of this world vocals. They throw in songs like “Whiplash Pants,” “Absolute Zero,” and “Song #3” before closing the set with “Through the Glass.”They renter the stage and absolutely kill the encore with “Made of Scars” and “Fabuless” (which if you have not seen the video for you have got to go check that out! Not many rock bands can pull off blow up crazy dolls.) At the end of this live recording we are absolutely left wanting more and with the feeling that we have just been to a show with a bunch of our friends watching one of the best bands in rock!
