Lachlan Bryan's Live Album Reviewed

Posted on Apr 14, 2021 in Album Reviews

Lachlan Bryan’s Live Album Reviewed

Lachlan Bryan and the Wildes

Live Album Reviewed ‘Nearest Misses Live’

Out Now

By Rob Dickens

He is one of Australia’s finest songwriters…and singers. Nearest Misses Live is proof positive of that.

At first blush, the irony that Lachlan Bryan wanted to release a live record during a pandemic is palpable.

But then again…if you have the right recordings in the vault, it in fact has proven to be a perfect time to release a record of an experience that we all cherish and miss enormously – nostalgic and comforting.

There’s another reason too. Bryan explains: “Our friend Tracey Griffiths said to me on the phone something like you know, you guys are just about due for a best of…”. “I laughed of course, and replied yeah maybe we’d call it ‘nearest misses’, instead of greatest hits”.

Whilst the ‘best of’ didn’t quite get to the finish line, the title idea stuck, and resurfaced during Victoria’s interminable* ‘Lockdown 2’, when he and bandmate/producer Damian Cafarella started digging through some live multi-track recordings they’d archived from their 2018/2019 tours.

“As we listened through we realised a couple of things”, Bryan says, “firstly that the recordings sounded pretty good – and secondly that the set lists from that tour pretty much were a ‘best of’ to that point in time – with a bit of polishing in the studio we might actually have that Nearest Misses album I’d joked about a few months earlier”.

The tracks on Nearest Misses Live represent a faithful collection from Lachlan Bryan and The Wildes’ four albums to date and the five-piece band sounds terrific on these recordings, cleverly mixed by Cafarella.

“The release kind of seems a little ironic” Lachlan says. “2020 was to be a big road year for us – we had festival bookings on three continents, and two extensive tours through the UK and Europe booked, cancelled, booked, cancelled and booked again. Of course, like everyone else, we never made it to a stage, but instead spent weeks listening back to the times when performing live and travelling was something we absolutely took for granted. I reckon it made us feel grateful, more than anything – I for one will never take this gig for granted again”

Given these troubled times, these live versions seem to have even more relevance in them than the originals. Nearest Misses Live is a gem, the best Australian music around. Do not take this record for granted.

Lachlan Bryan and The Wildes’s Nearest Misses Live is available now through Social Family Records.

The spine-tingling “Dugdemona”: