Various Artists: 120 Minutes Live

It's been about 10 years since MTV's late-night alt-rock showcase 120 Minutes first appeared, and the show has undergone some telling changes over the past decade, as this collection of live tracks illustrates: 120 Minutes, like the music it showcases, used to exist on a considerably smaller scale. The show's live performances, as these liner notes indicate, used to be casual happenings in which "Robyn Hitchcock, John Wesley Harding, or They Might Be Giants would bring an acoustic guitar… along for their interview." In 1993, slightly past the point at which alternative music exploded, 120 Minutes got bigger, with a new set allowing for full-scale performances by visiting artists. It's from this later period that 120 Minutes Live draws most of its material, and the uneven, generally worthwhile album is hardly evidence that bigger is always better. The immediate highlights come from those who rework and pare down their familiar material: Stripped-down versions of "C'mon Billy" by P.J. Harvey and "It's About Time" by a Lemonheads-less Evan Dando are fine examples. A similar approach to "Aeroplane" allows Bjork's unique voice to occupy the spotlight. But with hundreds of performances from which to choose, why include a lifeless take on "Pretty Vacant" by the 1996 incarnation of The Sex Pistols Why yet another version of "Kiss Off" by The Violent Femmes Why The Verve Pipe at all Still, there's probably something here for everybody, and if very little is as revelatory as a fierce rendition of "Fake Plastic Trees" by Radiohead, most of it is at least interesting. Like the program from which its material is drawn, 120 Minutes Live is seldom as edgy as it ought to be, but not without its charms.