Label: Image Entertainment
Released: September 4, 2007
Live albums often fail to walk the fine line between “so live that I can’t hear it” and “so clean that it sounds like the studio.” Megadeth’s That One Night, recorded in Buenos Aires in 2005, is not one of them. It is the rare live album that walks that line almost perfectly.
That One Night offers a Megadeth set that draws from nearly all of their albums (only Killing Is My Business and the not released at the time United Abominations make no contributions) with a slight preference for their late 80s/early 90s prime. Megadeth, despite the many line-up changes over the years, has always been a remarkably tight band and this makes it quite evident that it’s not just a matter of studio tricks. They’re really that good even 20 years down the road.
The one problem with the album is that it doesn’t quite compel me to keep listening so much as it makes me think about listening to the studio albums. It does everything right, yet still doesn’t offer much to entice the less-than-diehard Megadeth fan to keep coming back. It’s not that the album doesn’t capture Megadeth’s live energy so much as their live energy doesn’t offer more than their studio albums. To be fair, that’s true of most live albums though.
Rating: 7/10