Album Review: Get Gone by Seratones

At the heart of rock studio albums there are two types of albums. There are "live" albums, and "produced" albums.

What do I mean by that? Well a live album is an album that consists of songs that were written to be performed live and are produced in such a way as to either capture that live feel of the song or captured very simply to get the raw essence of the song. For instance early Beatles stuff was written to be performed live, but those songs simply had to be captured on record to easily convert to be a single. They didn't need a lot of production, the songs were good enough to stand on their own as singles. Capturing the live feel is much much harder. This becomes necessary when songs don't easily translate to the studio. Take the first Lone Justice album. A song like "Ways to Be Wicked" is great live or in the studio. It doesn't matter it's a great song. "East of Eden" on the other hand only works because the producers and the band were able to capture the live feel.

This differs from what I'm calling a produced album, which was always written with the studio in mind. Steely Dan were famous for writing for the studio and one reason why they never wanted to perform live. Studio stuff doesn't always translate to a live setting just like live stuff doesn't always translate to the studio.

All this leads us to the debut album from the Seratones. This is definitely a live band and these are live songs. A song like "Choking on Your Spit" makes you think of "East of Eden" and why I had Lone Justice on my mind. These guys have essentially created a live studio album and have done a solid job of it. The band is performing at high energy and the producers captured it perfectly. I was not surprised when I went to look for a video for this band to find mostly live performances. That is where this band lives.

This then leads us to another issue. For a band to find long term success they have to be able to write songs that can be successful in a studio environment. You can capture that live feel maybe once or twice, but it is hard to maintain over time. In order for this band to succeed moving forward they will have to find that other space with their music. Plenty of bands make that transition and plenty don't. It will be interesting to see how these guys do.

It should be noted that A.J. Haynes is a phenomenal rock vocal talent. So we'll be hoping she can find real success. Following the Rhapsody rating method I give it 2 out of 5 stars for Not Bad.