Search - Quiet Riot :: Live & Rare

For the Dedicated Only

Sampson Simpson | Canada | 04/12/2007

(1 out of 5 stars)

"I own every QR album, even the two Japanese records they did with Randy Rhoads, so obviously I had to own this one too. Unfortunately, the only good reason I can think of to own Live and Rare by Quiet Riot is if you're a completist. I should have known that by the cheap and cheesey cover art, but I definitely realized that upon first listen.



Although the liner notes say "produced by Frankie Banali" (QR drummer) and "mixed and mastered by Neil Citron" (latter days QR guitarist) you can't hear any production value or sound quality at all. This sounds like a bootleg, plain and simple, and I have heard better bootlegs. As for mixing and mastering, I speculate that Citron adjusted some levels on his PC and burned a master copy using a household CD burner. The two-second gap between songs (extremely annoying when you have crowd noise chopped off and then carried over) is just one clue as to the lack of care that went into this package. No one could possibly have played the CD and approved it for release without noticing, so I suspect that nobody played the CD before releasing it.



Sure, the material is great, you can't beat these classic tunes from Metal Health and Condition Critical, along with a drum solo and a couple rare early QR tracks (including one from the Randy Rhoads years). The demos are cool, done for the DuBrow solo album before he reformed QR in '83. The demos, however, are pretty much the only thing I can handle listening to. The rest, with its bootleg quality sound and two-second gaps between songs, is so close to unlistenable, I know that this QR album will recieve very few spins in my collection.



The truly scary thing? This CD is subtitled "Volume I".



EDIT 12/15/07

Very saddened by Kevin DuBrow's cocaine overdose. The first metal band I ever listened to will never rock again.



EDIT 03/15/08

I haven't listened to this CD since I bought it except for the studio tracks because of that 2 second gap. I decided to try burning a copy of the CD using Nero 8 and clicking "remove 2 second gap". It pretty much did the trick, there is a slight pause or pop when each track begins, but this trick will at least make the album listenable."