A little over 30 years on from their emergence onto the biggest stage of all, alternative rock legends Sponge continued to celebrate the anniversary with one of the most dynamic performances of their career, taking over (and selling out) Los Angeles’s Whisky A Go Go on November 4 2025, as their Electric Cattle Gods collection of lost out-takes and b-sides hit the stores.
That album was a magnificent offering despite its humble origins, but Sponge had a lot more to say than that. Streeting today, a beautifully bombastic document of that so memorable show, Live At The Whisky A Go Go, is available as both a special CD/DVD combo pack and a staggering red/tan/black/haze splatter vinyl LP. Plus 14 tracks (nine on the vinyl) that not only tell the story of the night, they also reflect the long history of Sponge themselves.
Released today as the band’s latest single, “Plowed” takes us all the way back to the beginning, as Sponge burst onto the scene with their effervescent debut album Rotting Piñata, and two massive hit singles. The live performance of “Molly (Sixteen Candles)” was released as a single last month. And now comes “Plowed,” a brain-burning live video that captures all the excitement and exuberance of the night itself.
VIDEO: https://youtu.be/vVpdKkPsSSY
On the live album, of course, “Plowed” is just one performance among many - albeit the final song of the night, with the audience so firmly behind the band that it’s hard, listening to it, to tell where the music ends and the rapture begins. Because, while there was not time for the band to play every one of the classics that mark out their maverick journey through the 90s and beyond, still they hit more highlights than even the most optimistic fan could have expected.
The title track of their half-million selling debut Rotting Piñata is here, alongside fellow first album highlights “Drownin’,” “Rainin’,” and “Neena Menasha.” From their sophomore set, Wax Ecstatic, we hear “Have You Seen Mary,” “Got To Be A Bore” and the title track; 2003’s For All The Drugs In The World unleashes its mighty opener “Treat Me Wrong”; 2005’s The Man sticks us with “Glue,” The Beer Sessions serves up “Sick Of It All” and the show’s seething opener “Jump While The House Is On Fire”; and from Sponge’s 2024 celebration of their own breakthrough year, 1994 delivers Blur’s nightclub anthem “Girls and Boys,” thrusting and thumping the band into the show’s closing salvo.
Vividly shot for the accompanying DVD, and sounding as raw as you could want, this is Sponge as they ought to be experienced, lurid, live and magic in the mosh pit.
CD/DVD/VINYL: https://cleorecs.com/search?q=sponge+live
DIGITAL:https://orcd.co/sponge_liveatthewhisky
Track listing
1.Jump While The House Is On Fire
2. Wax Ecstatic (To Sell Angelina)
3. Rotting Piñata
4. Molly (Sixteen Candles)
5. Glue (CD/DVD only)
6. Got To Be A Bore (CD/DVD only)
7. Have You Seen Mary
8. Treat Me Wrong (CD/DVD only)
9. Neenah Menasha (CD/DVD only)
10. Sick Of It All (CD/DVD only)
11. Rainin'
12. Girls & Boys
13. Drownin'
14. Plowed
