Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the album that put them on the map, Reckless Kelly revisits its glory years on Bulletproof Live. The Austinites’ third live LP preserves a West Coast jaunt from last summer without any overdubbing. As such, the recording captures noticeable differences from the original disc, not all of them pretty, but retains the feel of a collection that once reached No. 2 on Billboard‘s Heatseekers chart. David Abeyta’s guitar blisters live, while brothers Willy and Cody Braun country rock both contemporary (“Ragged as the Road”) and traditional (Merle Haggard’s “California Blues”), alongside more angst-ridden alternative fare (“One False Move”) and blues (“How Was California?”). New outlaw anthem “American Blood” chronicles the anger of Americans toward the Iraq War.
This article appears in August 16 • 2019.