Media hound Rob Zombie’s latest musical release, after the successful re-launch and re-imagining of the Halloween franchise this past August, is a live collection of songs recorded in 2006 as part of the Educated Horses tour. The disc, popping in at over an hour, and containing 18 songs, is a great mix of big radio hits and somewhat lower key songs dug deep from within the artist’s long career, even harking back to the days of White Zombie.

The massive production values of the live shows certainly come out to play here as the overall sound of the disc is loud, amplified, and certainly live with the banging drums and screeching guitars sometimes drowning out Zombie’s vocals. The crowd is ever present throughout, but, in opposition to most live albums around, either Zombie’s interaction with them is cut for the sake of time, or each concert is just one song after another until its all done kind of affair. The former could be understood, while the latter would certainly be disappointing. For those who have never made it to a Zombie show, they may feel as though the very fan-oriented singer/songwriter/director lacks that extra bit of stage presence.

As mentioned before, track selection ranges from the big hits like “Dragula,”; “Living Dead Girl,”; and “More Human than Human“; to deeper cuts like “House of 1000 Corpses“; and “Sawdust in the Blood.”; Zombie took a bit of flack for the entire Educated Horses album do to its decidedly different tone in comparison to the more macabre earlier works by the artists, so it’s nice to see him so vehemently include even deeper tracks from that disc.

The biggest disappointment of all is the once promised live DVD and highly anticipated art book were not released in tandem with the album, as once suspected, and will be streeting early 2008. Fans may take this as a way to grab even more money from them by selling the two sets separately, albeit a bundle pack containing all three items is all but a given next spring.

Overall, Zombie Live is a standard live album with great production values, no real surprises or new material, and just a general, middle-of-the-road type release to let Zombie’s legion of fans know that he’s still making music, touring, and coming to get you.

TRAPT’s third major label release, TRAPT Live!, is pretty much the standard live album fare with a collection of live tracks from the band’s two Warner Bros. releases including the successful singles “Headstrong”; and “Stillframe”;, but the real draw is the band’s first new studio single in nearly two years, “Stay Alive”;.

The band’s self titled release was seen by some, including myself, as a capitalization on the post-grunge sound made famous at the end of the 1990’s and early into this millennium, it didn’t really offer anything new, or bring anything substantially better to the table, but it went along at its own pace. Vocalist Chris Brown was keen to yell at us in “Headstrong”; but the band was also able to capture audiences with the infectious sound of “Stillframe”; (still this reviewer’s personal favorite track from the band). A maturing of the band could be seen in their second release, Someone in Control, but its here, with “Stay Alive”; that the band really begins to hit its stride and break out of the sophomore curse.

Proving that they aren’t a one hit wonder, TRAPT’s latest singles, previously only available on the band’s MySpace page, certainly cements them back into the rock scene with hard hitting guitars and Brown’s unmistakable voice in a state between outright yelling and his indoor voice.

The CD, however, is a pretty generic recording of only nine live tracks, which seems on the short side of things where other live albums, like Reel Big Fish’s Our Live Album is Better than Your Live Album continue on for nearly 30. Looking at the track times, the Live performance isn’t any more than a 40 minute set. Granted TRAPT doesn’t have the back catalog that bands like RBF have, but with two studio albums, and two indie albums before they were signed, I think fans might be expecting a bit more from the quartet.

In some respects the disc may be just a filler to put the new singles out there for the mainstream and hold everyone over until the release of the band’s upcoming studio album due to street in March 2008.