So I really like Ice Nine Kills. The music is fantastic, the performances are wonderfully campy and theatrical, they’re really creative and their songs are great.
I also really love live version of all the songs I listen to. Even shitty recordings have such a brilliant energy. You get musical improvisation, you get audience response, you get this rawness that isn’t always present on the studio version. Bands who put on a really good live show always rise a little bit in my eyes.
Savages was one of my least favorite songs on the Silver Scream when that came out. It felt too poppy, too overproduced, to same-y. The live version though, it fixes all those problems. The screams have more grit, the audience is screaming along, Spencer Charnas is yelling into the audience, the guitars feel more “real.” And in doing so you get a really campy, aggressive and energetic version of a song that felt really flat to me. I love live version in general. A lot of times I prefer the live version to the studio version. But this is one case where I think the live version is so so so much better than the studio version.