A live recording for every artist represents a pivotal moment in their career. It's the pinnacle of an artist's activity, the demonstration that their live performance reflects in all its grandiosity their skills and many talents.
Too often though, an artist's almost maniacal habit to polish a live recording to the bone, in order to try and maximize the clarity of the sound, it can be a double-edged sword that may not end up being as successful as an idea as the artist might have thought it would have been in the first place.
Thankfully, a very clever and hugely talented artist like the Australian guitarist and singer/songwriter Matty T Wall fully understood the importance to leave his first live album just released and called Live Down Underground as untouched as humanly possible, so to give to the listener a full experience of what one of Wall's live shows sounds like.
Live Down Underground captures a sonic polaroid of an artist like Wall at his very peak; supported on stage by a tremendously powerful Rhythm Section formed by Leigh Miller on bass guitar and Ric Whittle on drums, Matty T Wall unleashes his many abilities, especially on electric guitar with effortless power and control at the same time, gifting the audience present at the Lyric Underground venue in Perth, Western Australia with a truly memorable performance on one of the finest live albums released in 2022 so far.
Wall maximised purposely the intensity of the performance by recording the album in Lo-Fi, something that allowed both Wall and his band's sound power to shine even more at every point of the live recording.
Needless to say, the album is a complete representation of Matty T Wall as an artist at 360 degrees; his guitar skills are breathtaking, especially on instrumentals like Sophia's Strut, Scorcher and Slideride, while his vocals are crisp, solid and powerful, as amply showcased especially on songs like Burnin Up Burnin Down and Walk Out The Door.
Even when Wall takes the foot off the sound accelerator, the outcome is still brilliant and exciting. In that respect, a song like This Is Real, a tune that starts with a distinctive 60's Detroit Soul vibe and end with an epic crescendo that transports the tune in a thunderous Blues/Rock territory, it is the perfect demonstration of the natural talent and musical vision occurring year after year in the constant artistic growth of the Australian Guitar Master.
By the time the album closes with another rather classy performance of Smile, one of the many highlights of Wall's 2016 debut studio record Blue Skies, a music lover is left both positively astounded by the majesty of this record and the desire to hear more and more from Matty T Wall's sonic bag of tricks.
In the last 6 years, through the arrival on the music scene of a rising star like Matty T Wall, Australia has released to the world one of the most talented, exciting and most vibrant Blues/Rock artists of this generation. A record like Live Down Underground has just confirmed it once more. Again.
Live Down Underground is out now and it is available via Amazon
