Fu Manchu
Go For It… Live! (Steamhammer/ SPV)
by Brian Varney
The one emotion that I can confidently proclaim nobody has ever experienced while listening to a Fu Manchu album is surprise. Fu Manchu do what they do, they do it well, and they don’t deviate from the path they’ve been following since 1990 or so. You know what you’ll be getting when you buy a Fu Manchu release, and if you don’t like it, you wouldn’t be buying it in the first place.
Throughout its life span, the double live album has served to collect a band’s finest songs from the handful of albums which preceded it, add some witty stage patter and audience participation segments for extra fun, perhaps the oddball cover, and perhaps a lengthy jam or two. Fu Manchu, who understand the double live era of music (i.e. the 19-fuggin-70s, duh) better than most of the bands who are now practicing under the “stoner rock” banner, follow this template admirably, resulting in a fine double live album which you can proudly file alongside things like Humble Pie’s Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore, the first KISS Alive!, etc.
There’s enough of everything here to satisfy those who claim to only like certain Fu Manchu albums – comic as it seems, there are folks who only like “the early stuff,” which to me seems like saying, “I think Bon-era AC/DC really went downhill after Powerage.” Regardless of where your sympathies fall within the band’s discography, if you like Fu Manchu, I can’t see you not liking Go For It… Live!
(www.spv.de)