Disclaimer
From this point on, my entries will be a lot shorter. I wish I could give you an in-depth portrait of each concert, make you feel like you were really there, but I cannot. I have fifteen entries to file before the end of the week, before teaching consumes my life once again, so I will have to be brief. Each entry will have to consist of concert Highs, Lows, and little else. I'll include a few Behind the Music anecdotes where I can, but it'll be mostly bullet points from now on.
Behind the Music / Lows
I thought I'd arrived at Madison Square Garden with plenty of time to spare. The White Stripes concert two weeks earlier started two and a half hours after it said it did, so I thought arriving an hour "late" would be an hour "early." As I walked through the tunnel, however, I could hear that they'd started. I later found out that they'd already played five songs, "Supermassive Black Hole," "Map of the Problematique," "City of Delusion," "Hysteria," and "Knights of Cydonia"!
As I made my way to my seat, I was excited that I'd at least be close to the stage. When I made it there, however, I found I was "close to the stage" in the same way I would have been "close to the movie screen" if I had watched a movie from the Emergency Exit door on the front left side of the theater. I had crane my neck to properly see or hear any of the performers. It was terrible.
Highs
Fortunately, I found that packed as the crowd may have been, there were still some single seats available. I walked a few sections back, saw a seat that wouldn't give me whiplash, and settled in. Now I could enjoy the music.
Which I THOROUGHLY enjoyed. I cannot come up with a single complaint about the actual music. The actual music ROCKED.
The slow-building "Butterflies and Hurricanes" was the first song I heard as I settled into my new seat. Nice.
I loved that they played the dreamy "Starlight" and the nightmarish "Time is Running Out" back to back before the encore. The song's contrast was enhanced by the blissful / apocalyptic images on the video screen. The songs were also improved by the audience participation. Three weeks earlier, Dispatch had been buoyed by audience participation, but this was totally different. "Elias" had been a heart-tugger, an international Kumbaya. "Starlight" and especially "Time is Running Out" were pulse-racers, songs which drew everyone into the same frenzied fantasy world...not made them want to hug.
Waiting for the band to come back for an encore, I recalled when they came to William and Mary. That night had given me a brief taste of Muse: seven or eight songs before (groan) "My Chemical Romance" took the stage. It also featured a great after-party: an EPIC battle with Mike Vance, Magic Mike Erickson, Ed, Sara, Pancho, and Pancho's brother Diego in Unit C 203. This night didn't include an after-party, but it included many more songs -- 19 in total. Taken together, both nights made for a near perfect Muse experience. (Perfect would have been if I'd arrived on time, and if I had had floor seats. Like the seats Mike Erickson had at the Patriot Center three days later -- damn him!)
"Take a Bow" was the final encore song!!! They'd played my favorite song! You never hear anyone talk about "Take a Bow," so with just minutes left in the concert, I assumed they'd left it out. But they didn't! It's the scariest, trippiest track. It just builds and builds and builds, this maelstrom of rage and paranoia...it's awesome.
Grade: A-
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment