Live’r Than You’ll Ever Be by The Kleptones (Review)

There are few folks out there mashing things up nearly as well as Brighton-based The Kleptones (aka Eric Kleptone). I first discovered his/their mad skills via A Night at the Hip Hopera, which blended Queen’s classic sounds with a cornucopia of hip-hop vocals, movie samples, and so on. And the Kleptones’ mashup of Bon Jovi and George Michael on Best of Bootie 2006 was easily the disc’s highlight.

And now the Kleptones are back with Live’r Than You’ll Ever Be, a live recording from Bestival 2007. It’s everything you’ve come to expect from The Kleptones: a madcap pastiche that finds INXS, Aerosmith, Queen, Phil Collins, Edwin Starr, The Sugarhill Gang, Aphex Twin, Bon Jovi, Nine Inch Nails, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and many more thrown into the musical blender with the resulting purée being so much more than the sum of its ingredients. And it’s all done live.

As with the best mashups, you find yourself wondering how it was possible that these disparate sounds weren’t put together earlier, as if this is how it should always have been, and musical genres and cliques be damned.