Creed — Live in San Antonio (2-LP, Metallic Silver Vinyl) REVIEW

Creed: Live In San Antonio (Black Friday RSD release) is the kind of artifact you fish out of a bargain bin and buy "ironically," only to find-mid-listen, mid-smirk-your foot tapping, your soul accidentally stirring. Those bins always smell faintly of melted plastic and somebody's regrets.

This record comes 25 years overdue to its own intervention-or whatever the vinyl equivalent is. An exorcism? A stern talking-to? I don't know.

Recorded November 14, 1999: Creed at the Freeman Coliseum, riding the Human Clay juggernaut into a sold-out Texas crowd that believed-truly believed-that arena rock could still house the divine.

But then the record starts, and the sound leaps out with that odd late '90s confidence, the sort of thing bands had before the internet taught everybody how to apologize for existing. Stapp storms in, his voice tight and towering. I'd forgotten it used to sound like this-less meme, more mammal. "Are You Ready?" then blares, and I'm suddenly sucked back into a time when people bought CDs on purpose and actually believed choruses might save them. The crowd sounds unhinged; their roar suggests they are, in fact, ready-for transcendence, for catharsis, for whatever it meant to be young and overwhelmed with emotion at the tail end of the last millennium.

Side A sprints. "Ode," "Torn," "Beautiful"—these songs spill out faster than you can

remember why you'd written Creed off in the first place.

 Tremonti's guitar sounds like it's been dipped in kerosene—or motor oil, I can never tell the

difference at high volume. You can almost hear sweat hitting the mic stand. His work

remains criminally underappreciated, possibly because it's so efficient at its job that you

forget someone's actually playing the damn thing. Or maybe we just didn't want to give

Creed credit for anything by 2003.

The whole show locks in somewhere around Side B. "Illusion" is a brick tossed from a

moving pickup. "Say I" is this snarling, stomping slab of righteous indignation, tailor-made

for anyone who ever yelled at a microwave for heating unevenly. Somewhere around here I

realised I hadn't drunk water in hours. "My Own Prison" still has big melodrama lie, but in a 

charming way, I'd like to think that Stapp is flipping through his own diary in front of

thousands and hoping the lighting hides the pages with the worst handwriting.

It's undeniably electric, in a way that makes you understand- however begrudgingly- why

Creed sold more records than your favorite critically-acclaimed-but-commercially-ignored

alternative band.

Side C is where the nostalgia engine really revs into high gear. "What If" is still so muscular

it should probably have a gym membership. "With Arms Wide Open" reaches out and grabs

your feels by the collar (I tend to sing "With LEGS Wide Open" because I find it amusing to 

piss people off.) Stapp's voice sounds and feels like a real human is up there instead of the

meme people turned him into. Listen to the audience singing along and try not to feel

something-even if that something is profound cultural vertigo. This was the song that was

inescapable, insufferable, and somehow, through the alchemy of time and ironic distance,

moving again. Fuck it, don't quote me on that. "Faceless Man" drifts in with this billowing,

slow-burn intensity-the kind of song that makes you stare at the floor like it's about to reveal

something. It doesn't, but you keep looking anyway.

"What's This Life For" is an argument with God yelled over the din of an air conditioner

that's seen things, "One" stomps around with its heavy-handed morality and still somehow

works-though I'm not entirely sure why and I'm not asking too many questions at this point-

and then "Higher," the closer, the elevator to the heavens, the song that refuses to die.

San Antonio screams every word like they're attempting to levitate the building. Honestly?

Good for them. By the time Stapp howls about ascending "six feet from the edge," you can

practically smell the spilled beer and teenaged desperation wafting through the grooves.

"Higher" remains their most bulletproof creation: dumb as rocks, impossible to kill, and

weirdly effective at making you feel things you'd rather not examine too closely.

The sonic quality is really something here: a warm, room-filling capture that makes one

appreciate the real space of arena rock. One can almost hear the place breathe. The mix

doesn't bury the crowd; they're present participants in this ritual, their voices bleeding into

every chorus like a congregation that showed up ready to testify. The uncomfortable truth this  record forces us to confront is that Creed was enormous not despite their earnest, unironic emotional maximalism but because of it.

In a time drowning in post-grunge cynicism and nu-metal machismo, they could offer

something else: naked vulnerability wrapped in guitar bombast, spiritual yearning for the

mall-going masses. They were profoundly uncool. The uncoolness made them phenomenally

successful. Which made them even less cool. Which made them more successful. Eventually, 

it all collapsed under its own weight, but not before it moved mountains of units and lodged

itself permanently in the cultural cortex.

This record plays like a lost chapter in the Creed saga: one in which the band weren't

punchlines yet, one in which they could still fill a coliseum without apology, one in which

Stapp's voice hit the rafters without collapsing under the weight of a thousand Internet jokes.

And it's messy and earnest and overblown and far more alive than anyone would expect. This  pressing exists in that weird cultural space where nostalgia and irony and genuine

appreciation blur together like cheap vodka and Hawaiian Punch.

Is it good? Define good. Does it rock? Unquestionably. Even Scott Stapp sounds like a man

who hasn't yet been flattened by fame and legal troubles and becoming a living punchline—

which is to say, he sounds excellent, even transcendent in moments. 

In short, the 3,000 copies of Live In San Antonio pressed will likely appreciate nicely for the 

collectors who managed to snag one. The real value, though, isn't financial; it's

archaeological. This is artifact preservation of a very specific cultural moment when arena

rock still meant something to millions, when earnestness hadn't yet curdled entirely into

meme fodder, when a band from Tallahassee could sell out the Freeman Coliseum and make

it feel like a religious experience. Whether that's inspiring or depressing probably depends on how your twenties went.

Spin it loud. Let your neighbours judge you. Feel the cognitive dissonance of knowing this is

deeply silly while begrudgingly admitting it rips.

A sight to behold, the silver vinyl sounds even better, which, all said and done, is probably

the most Creed thing possible-form and function in harmony, thanks to the sheer, stubborn

force of will.

Score: 7.8/10 Knocking points because it's Creed in 2025, and I'm contractually obligated to

pretend to have mixed feelings, but giving it the 7.8 because this live set honestly smokes half  the stuff released "unironically" today.

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