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Welcome to “Question of the Week,” a (sometimes) weekly debate amongst the MetalSucks staff regarding a recent hot button issue.

There weren’t any real hot button topics this week, so we decided to just play a fun game that used to keep Vince and Axl occupied for many a lunch period when they were kids:

The MS staff’s answers after the jump.

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Photo by Greg Aiello

On Friday night, Vince and I saw Living Colour live for what I think must have been the seventh or maybe eighth time. And it’s a testament to the abilities of this band that, in a day and age when so many groups are seemingly just going through the motions, we’ve really never seen the same Living Colour show twice. These dudes just seem to come from another time and place – an era when a live performance wasn’t about doing a note-for-note recreation of your albums so much as it was about creating a unique experience for the audience. In that regard, Living Colour still delivers in spades.

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Living Colour performing their new single,”Behind the Sun,” on WYNC’s Soundcheck this past Friday.

Getting to spend nearly an hour on the phone with Vernon Reid was another huge fanboy moment in my life. The band’s debut album, Vivid, was one the first cassettes (!) I ever purchased on my own, making Living Colour one of the first bands I ever listened to that weren’t introduced to me by my parents. Today, more than twenty years later, the band is releasing their fifth studio album, The Chair in the Doorway (Megaforce). The fact that it’s no less powerful or brilliant than Vivid made talking to Reid even more exciting, because my love of the music he and his band make isn’t at all rooted in nostalgia (read my review of the record here).

As you’ll see from the following transcript of our chat, Reid doesn’t exactly think in linear terms. There were definitely moments when I had thoughts such as “Why is he talking about Pokemon?”, for example. But he always comes back around to his original point, leading to many “Oooooohhhhh! I get it now!” moments in the conversation. And given the dude’s music, that makes perfect sense: while Living Colour is ostensibly a traditionalist hard rock band, they’re still constantly and thinking outside the box and trying to navigate unexplored terrain.

After the jump, check out Reid’s thoughts on the writing and recording of The Chair in the Doorway, the meaning of that album’s title, the joys of interacting with fans through the net, and more.

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Are Living Colour feeling doubtful about their own identity? The band’s first studio album in six years, The Chair in the Doorway, deals largely with questions of self. “Gonna strip it all away,” vocalist Cory Glover repeats over and over again during album opener “Burned Bridges.” “I am the role I play,” he declares on “The Chair,” before wondering “Who am I today?” On “Out of My Mind,” he talks about “losing myself” and “shedding my skin.”

If Glover and his band mates – guitarist Vernon Reid, bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Will Calhoun – really are feeling doubtful about themselves, they’re being neurotic for no reason. The Chair in the Doorway cements the band’s identity as one of the best American rock bands of the past two decades.

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On Thursday night Vince and I got to go see Living Colour perform their soon-to-be-released new album, The Chair in the Doorway, in its entirety, for an audience of maybe fifty people in a small rehearsal space in Brooklyn.

Needless to say, it was friggin’ awesome.

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I’m auto-setting this post to go up at 11:30 am, because I will not actually be in front of a computer at 11:30 am – I will be doing a phoner with Vernon Reid. Rarely do I get nervous about conducting interviews, but this is definitely one of those times when I’m right on the verge of just having a total fanboy moment.

A lot of my man-crush on Reid has to do with seeing Living Colour live. When this band wants to decimate a room, they will decimate it. You’re talking about four dudes who, against all odds, are still as energetic on-stage now as they were two decades ago, and who understand the concept that a concert can, and should, be more than just playing note-for-note renditions of their songs. I hesitate to call Living Colour a “jam band” because I don’t want you to get the impression that they’re Phish or whatever, but they do a lot of jamming on-stage, and because they’re all so incredibly, ridiculously, almost unfairly-to-other-bands talented, it’s always just as invigorating as watching them rip in to “Cult of Personality” or “Love Rears its Ugly Head.”

So. There’s a new LC album, The Chair in the Doorway, coming out September 15 on Megaforce. And a new LC album means a new LC tour.

I implore you – if you’ve never seen these cats live before, you must must must go. It really is just a mind-blowing experience. Seriously: they’re doing two shows here in NYC, and Vince and I fully plan to go to both of them. They’re that good.

Dates after the jump.

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Living Colour are streaming a new song, “Behind the Sun,” on their MySpace page. It’s our first sample of the new music that will appear on their forthcoming The Chair in the Doorway, which comes out September 15.

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