The best thing about a live CD is feeling as though you’re there standing before the stage, regardless of whether you’ve ever seen the act live in concert or not. This is Thrice, the Californian rock band now on indefinite hiatus, in a complete snapshot of their expansive career.

It may as well be said now, fans of Thrice should buy this regardless. It’s the band presented exactly as they are live, with no post production audio magic like pitch corrections or overdub. It feels disappointingly rare that a band can be this honest with their fans, and it’s Thrice‘s intention to have ‘Anthology’ serve as a farewell memento in case they don’t return from their hiatus.

It’s a collection of recordings from their last tour, as opposed to just a single show, and this covers the band’s catalogue from start to finish. It feels carefully compiled and the recordings have certainly been chosen with a lot of care, but it still maintains an intimate, direct good vibe that flourishes in the edit-free recordings of songs like ‘Yellow Belly’ , ‘Image of the Invisible’ and ‘The Artist in the Ambulance’. It continues to capture the anthemic, sing-along nature of the band’s cult following and mass success besides in a very respectable tour of the band’s releases since ‘Identity Crisis’, their first full length album released in 2001 storming right on through six more studio releases to the most recent ‘Minor/Major’. No stone has been left unturned, and ‘Anthology’ covers the band from heavy tracks like ‘To Awake and Avenge The Dead’ to the soft and world-weary ‘Beggars’, prefaced by some sentiments by Dustin Kensrue. These live words speak volumes of a band who have been doing what they do best for a very long time.

Thrice are well known for their stamina, and this is another aspect of their career ‘Anthology’ encapsulates perfectly, it could just be the string of performances cherry-picked from a crop of countless shows but it really just serves to highlight the intense connection the band had with the crowd at every single venue, and their consistency from show to show. This should be considered essential for anyone who loves Thrice or just a good live rock performance.