Luna Live achieves the goal of any good live album. It introduces newcomers to this near-legendary alternative band, while showcasing enough new twists on their material to satisfy the most diehard of Luna fans.

Recorded at New York's Knitting Factory and Washington, D.C.'s 9:30 Club, Luna Live is much more than a document of their The Days Of Our Nights tour. Although the dark moodiness of that album's sound is apparent here, it's tempered with remarkable subtlety -- a quality often lost in live recordings.

How that subtlety is achieved is what makes this CD worthwhile. There are fourteen tracks on Luna Live, and each is performed with a nearly ascetic, bare-bones ethos. It's as if Luna had decided to strip each song to its essentials, thus putting their lyrics and melodies front-and-center.

The CD does have its share of flaws, however.

What leaps out from its tracklisting is that no less than seven songs are culled from 1999's Penthouse album, and two of the songs are covers. For a band with no less than five studio albums, the remaining five songs are taken from their other four albums. Secondly, despite the masterful guitars of Dean Wareham and Sean Eden carrying the melodies, Wareham's deadpan voice tends to flatten the live intensity of several of the songs. All in all though, Live is a solid concert album that should please neophytes and connoisseurs alike.