The Asheville group known as Free The Optimus has been going strong for several years now, and they’ve alternated between group projects and solo projects as they went along, meaning that we’ve got a lot of different looks from them. One look that we haven’t gotten up until this point was a live album. That all changes as they release Asheville Downtown Live.

Free The Optimus has always been about repping their hometown of Asheville, so it would make sense that went it came time to make a live album, they would use their performance at the long running Downtown Live After 5 concert series as the platform. For this performance, the trio of C. Shreve The Professor, Mike L!VE, and DJ Jet are joined by the live band known as JBOT, who provide live guitar, keys, and drums to the proceedings. The main appeal of a lot of live albums is capturing the energy of a group, and that’s definitely on display with Asheville Downtown Live. You can definitely feel how the group brings it to a live setting and interacts with the audience as they work through their set, which is then heightened with the addition of JBOT bringing the live instrumentation on top of everything else. The biggest drawback to the album, though, is the mix, which just doesn’t do anybody any favors, as we’re constantly losing different pieces of each song, whether it be someone’s vocals or scratching from Jet or part of the band. It’s the type of thing that’s frustrating when you’re at the concert, but you can power through a little bit if you can interact with the energy and passion of the performance. When you’re listening to a live album, the frustration of the mix just becomes heightened, and you can’t fall back on feeling the bass or the rhythm of the flow or dancing with your friends.

Free The Optimus are a talented group, and they’ve released a lot of good albums and EPs up until this point in their career. Unfortunately, when they decided to release their first live album, they did so with a performance that didn’t have the right mix to do their performance justice, and the album suffers because of it.