|
Post by MyNameIsNoneOfYourGoddamnBusin on Nov 30, 2021 10:52:51 GMT -5
Scored some very good comped seats for the Detroit show on the Genesis farewell show and wow . . . that was something.
Phil Collins is only seventy, but appeared to be at least twenty years older. I knew he had some issues that forced him to retire from drumming, but I didn't realize what a frail old man had become. Firstly, he hobbled out on a cane (which made the short encore break seem a little cruel) and had to remain seated for the entire performance (which made "I Can't Dance" seem more accurate than ever). The voice isn't entirely gone, but it's pretty close. Honestly, the whole thing was a lot more sad than fun.
Special shout out to the busker playing "In The Air Tonight" on the saxophone as the arena cleared out.
|
|
|
Post by ganews on Dec 8, 2021 16:54:31 GMT -5
I helped with Wifemate's booth at an art sale last weekend, and it had definitely the best music of any of these events (especially because it's at a time of year when it's all-too-easy to turn on the boring Christmas Music Radio Station). The Hot Club of DC, a four-piece with two guitars, double bass, and clarinet/saxophone, played for over two hours. Very talented but also unobtrusive; I could imagine giving them rapt attention or just going to sleep. In other words, the perfect music for an event that needs background but isn't about music. Too bad I missed the harpist on the second day.
|
|
|
Post by pantsgoblin on Dec 15, 2021 15:05:33 GMT -5
Cool show from harpist Mary Lattimore. She's touring behind last year's terrific Silver Ladders and a just-released b-sides collection, the latter of which I'll need to check out because it was some of the best compositions she played. Though she relies on loops and effects for texture, her technical skill is readily apparent and you could hear a pin drop in the audience. She brought out one of the openers, an experimental accordionist named Walt McClements, for added atmosphere on a couple songs to great effect, including a superior rendition of "Til a Mermaid Drags You Under" from Silver Ladders.
|
|
|
Post by *Deep, Pained Sigh* on Jan 30, 2022 14:59:58 GMT -5
seeing lingua ignota in october
|
|
|
Post by The Sensational She-Hulk on Feb 18, 2022 10:46:42 GMT -5
Paul McCartney is playing Camden Yards this June and I am seriously considering going.
|
|
|
Post by Desert Dweller on Feb 21, 2022 1:02:58 GMT -5
Paul McCartney is playing Camden Yards this June and I am seriously considering going.
I saw Paul McCartney about 10 years ago and he was AMAZING. This was easily one of the best concerts I've ever attended.
|
|
|
Post by The Sensational She-Hulk on Feb 21, 2022 9:08:20 GMT -5
Paul McCartney is playing Camden Yards this June and I am seriously considering going.
I saw Paul McCartney about 10 years ago and he was AMAZING. This was easily one of the best concerts I've ever attended.
The local classic rock station is having a contest, so it's fortunate that I work from home and can listen for one of his songs to send my text. I doubt I'll get anywhere, because I have the luck of Charlie Brown on Halloween, but it's fun trying.
|
|
|
Post by Desert Dweller on Feb 21, 2022 22:22:59 GMT -5
I saw Paul McCartney about 10 years ago and he was AMAZING. This was easily one of the best concerts I've ever attended.
The local classic rock station is having a contest, so it's fortunate that I work from home and can listen for one of his songs to send my text. I doubt I'll get anywhere, because I have the luck of Charlie Brown on Halloween, but it's fun trying.
Anything can happen! I have terrible luck, but I once won concert tickets for Fleetwood Mac, with the Rumors lineup, by entering one ticket in a raffle. It is one of only two things I've ever won. So, you never know!
I had to have my parents buy the Paul McCartney tickets for me, though, as a birthday gift. Because those were seriously around $100 each.
|
|
|
Post by The Sensational She-Hulk on Feb 22, 2022 10:32:05 GMT -5
The local classic rock station is having a contest, so it's fortunate that I work from home and can listen for one of his songs to send my text. I doubt I'll get anywhere, because I have the luck of Charlie Brown on Halloween, but it's fun trying.
Anything can happen! I have terrible luck, but I once won concert tickets for Fleetwood Mac, with the Rumors lineup, by entering one ticket in a raffle. It is one of only two things I've ever won. So, you never know!
I had to have my parents buy the Paul McCartney tickets for me, though, as a birthday gift. Because those were seriously around $100 each.
My boss (also a huge Beatles fan) has American Express, which enabled her to take advantage of early ticket sales. She scored tickets for herself and her husband and got two for my mom and me, so I'm paying her back as soon as she gives me her Venmo information. They're upper-level and were only $80 -- I can live with nosebleed seats because it means I GET TO SEE PAUL MCCARTNEY.
Somewhere, my 12-year-old self has passed out from the excitement.
|
|
LazBro
Prolific Poster
Posts: 10,049
|
Post by LazBro on Feb 25, 2022 12:40:55 GMT -5
Unless something happens along sooner, or it's cancelled, my first concert of pandemic life will be this July. Coheed and Cambria, with Dance Gavin Dance (shut up I like them) and Mothica. Not excited about the "amphitheater show in Texas in the middle of summer" part of it, but very excited for the show itself.
|
|
|
Post by MyNameIsNoneOfYourGoddamnBusin on Mar 3, 2022 8:34:52 GMT -5
Completed my "Bland Stadium Acts of 1982" bingo card by snagging comped tickets for Journey and Toto last night. So that happened.
|
|
|
Post by The Sensational She-Hulk on Mar 3, 2022 10:41:38 GMT -5
They're upper-level and were only $80 -- I can live with nosebleed seats because it means I GET TO SEE PAUL MCCARTNEY. Seats in the same section were going for upwards of $400 apiece last time I checked on Monday. Boy, did we ever score.
|
|
|
Post by Djse (and a Sack of Cats) on Mar 3, 2022 21:23:13 GMT -5
I have a ticket to see Sumac on Sunday. I really need this a lot.
|
|
|
Post by Desert Dweller on Mar 6, 2022 3:07:05 GMT -5
Does Musical theater/opera count here? The local Opera company put on Sondheim's "A Little Night Music" this weekend. A friend and I went. It was really really good. The costumes and set design were by Isaac Mizrahi, and I gotta say I did not love this. It is very strange to see the Quintet dressed up as woodland fairies. I intellectually understand the connection between this show and "Midsummer Night's Dream" but literal fairies in this show is very strange.
|
|
|
Post by MyNameIsNoneOfYourGoddamnBusin on Mar 30, 2022 19:44:47 GMT -5
Someone had an extra ticket for Jerry Cantrell's solo club tour and I was able to weasel it my way--I offered to buy the guy a beer at the show and he instantly counter-offered a T-shirt (still cheaper than the ticket price but a shrewd negotiation tactic). Jerry is promoting a solo album, but approximately half the set was Alice In Chains' greatest hits. Since Alice In Chains is pretty much just Jerry and some hired guns anyway, it was as close to a de facto intimate setting Alice In Chains as I'm likely to see, so it was pretty cool to be in a small room a few rows from the stage for it.
|
|
|
Post by Desert Dweller on Apr 3, 2022 4:33:22 GMT -5
Apparently I am going to see Elton John's Farewell Tour. Again! I saw this tour in January 2019. Elton is coming back to town November 2022. Thanks to COVID, this might be the longest farewell tour of all time. A friend texted me tonight at 1am and asked if I was going to the newly announced concert. I said the ticket presale was still going on and I had the access code if he wanted to go. So, I guess we're going. This ticket price is nearly matches what my monthly increase in pay will be thanks to my new raise. So, 1/12th of that raise is now blown.
On the good side, this is a stadium with a retractable roof and it's in November. So, hopefully it can be an outdoor concert at a time with little COVID risk.
|
|
|
Post by MyNameIsNoneOfYourGoddamnBusin on Apr 12, 2022 9:35:00 GMT -5
Had free tickets to the Jack White show in Grand Rapids the other night. The two Detroit shows were near instant sell-outs, including the "surprise" wedding concert Friday night (as much as it's being publicized as impromptu, the rumor was going around the morning of the show) but demand in Grand Rapids was far lower, even with the large contingent of fans who travelled in from Detroit. I had upper bowl seats in the small arena and was almost immediately upgraded to lower level by one of the ushers went we got to them. The place was maybe half-full when Jack took the stage.
His new wife was the opener. She was okay, but I wasn't familiar with who she was beforehand. Jack White's set was pretty good, a good mixture of all of the well-known sections of his career (his solo singles, a few White Stripes hits--including at least one that per setlist.fm hadn't been played live since they were still together, the Raconteurs), plus the pleasant surprise of his version of U2's "Love is Blindness".
I'd never seen him before in any capacity, so I was curious about the way the White Stripes material was going to be arranged, ie was he going to give his bassist a break and just play them as a two-piece the way they were meant to be heard? Apparently not.
|
|
|
Post by Desert Dweller on Apr 13, 2022 0:14:00 GMT -5
His new wife was the opener. She was okay, but I wasn't familiar with who she was beforehand. Jack White's set was pretty good, a good mixture of all of the well-known sections of his career (his solo singles, a few White Stripes hits--including at least one that per setlist.fm hadn't been played live since they were still together, the Raconteurs), plus the pleasant surprise of his version of U2's "Love is Blindness".
Very cool! I'd love to see him.
Was this U2 cover the same version he's been doing, as in the one on the Great Gatsby soundtrack, or has he changed it up at all?
|
|
|
Post by MyNameIsNoneOfYourGoddamnBusin on Apr 13, 2022 7:42:41 GMT -5
His new wife was the opener. She was okay, but I wasn't familiar with who she was beforehand. Jack White's set was pretty good, a good mixture of all of the well-known sections of his career (his solo singles, a few White Stripes hits--including at least one that per setlist.fm hadn't been played live since they were still together, the Raconteurs), plus the pleasant surprise of his version of U2's "Love is Blindness".
Very cool! I'd love to see him.
Was this U2 cover the same version he's been doing, as in the one on the Great Gatsby soundtrack, or has he changed it up at all?
It sounded the same as the version I'm familiar with, faithful enough to the original without being chained to it.
|
|
|
Post by pantsgoblin on Apr 16, 2022 18:04:06 GMT -5
Neil Rolnick, an avant-garde composer who was an early adopter of the digital keyboard sampler in the late '80s. It wasn't good. His work, unfortunately, has not stood the test of time; unlike, say, Philip Glass (not to mention hip-hop guys like Mantronix), it never comes off as anything as much as chop-ups of much better music (Robert Johnson, Balkan vocal groups, etc.).
|
|
|
Post by King Charles’s Butterfly on Apr 17, 2022 2:17:07 GMT -5
Was it already last week? Anyway I saw Yuja Wang at the LA Phil—each half she started out with a more romantic piece—a Beethoven “Hunt” sonata no. 18 for the first half (played more punchy than Beethoven usually is, which suits his piano work well) and a Scriabin in the second. After each, though, it went into different territory, and territory that’s hard to know immediately because Wang did not announce her program before the concert. I’ve liked this approach to art and music for a long time, and it not only means you hear without preconceptions but also that it puts you on unsteady ground where you have to grab hold of the music to find yourself. I had no idea what a Ligeti piece for solo piano would sound like—I got to find out and explore it without thinking 2001 the whole time. The end of her scheduled perfomance were a couple of pieces by Nikolai Kasputin, a composer with obvious jazzy influences. Again, I wouldn’t have dug into him if I didn’t read about him later—he didn’t consider himself a jazz musician, but he did have a band that had a regular gig at high-end restaurant. He also was an interpreter of Prokofiev, and I’ve seen Wang play him too—kind of makes sense when you consider her interpretation of Beethoven.
I’d say it made a nice, oblique ellipse but there were a ridiculous number of encores: six encores! Philip Glass was in there, live and acoustically.
|
|
|
Post by Desert Dweller on Apr 21, 2022 19:07:51 GMT -5
Can I put a Musical review into this thread? Musicals are kinda similar to concerts, right?
A friend took me to see the touring production of "Hadestown" last night.
This is such a weirdly constructed show. Basically: Music = good Lyrics = bad Secondary characters/secondary plot = good Main characters/main plot = bad
Even the production design is weird, in that the set design it self is pretty good, but their usage of the set in the climax scene is really, really bad.
I didn't know anything about this show, other than knowing who Hades is, before I saw it. It starts off with a somewhat upbeat, jazzy song, which introduces the setting and characters. The main characters are introduced. Orpheus and Eurydice. ...... Um, what? Wow, that was a real moment of cognitive dissonance.
So, if you don't know, this show is a "modern" retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Euryidce. (By modern, I mean that it looks to be set in Depression-era New Orleans). However, what the show really wants to be is a retelling of the story of Hades and Persephone. Because wow, that secondary story is tons of fun, well performed and well written. It feels like the writer had a lot to say here, and had the makings of an excellent allegory.
Unfortunately, the main story about Orpheus and Eurydice is way too abstract and horribly dull. The characterization of those two is nearly nonexistent. I'm not sure they'd even qualify as stereotypes. The "love story" between them is little more than "Hi, nice to meet you, I love you". And then Orpheus spends the next 20 show minutes ignoring her.
And wow, if you hate narrators in film, you will HATE this show. This show essentially refuses to let Orpheus or Eurydice speak for themselves. Not only is there a Narrator, who is for some unknown reason Hermes?, but there is also a female trio of Fates, AND a five member chorus. And the writer lets the Narrator and The Fates tell us what is happening AND spread information to the other characters. And this doesn't create some kind of cool meta-vibe where you are being told the myth so as to make it more memorable. (See: Sondheim's "Into the Woods") Honestly, the Wikipedia entry on this myth is more interesting than what is told in this musical.
What all these middlemen do is defang Hades, and make Orpheus and Eurydice total ciphers. Like, in Act II, Hades doesn't speak to Orpheus to give him the conditions under which he can leave. Instead the Fates come up with some abstract plan, seem to manipulate Hades into it, then Hades tells Hermes (why is he the narrator?), and then Hermes tells Orpheus. Why would Hades not want Orpheus to leave? This show won't tell. The Fates say he'd be thought "a spineless king", and that's all you get. Um, what? And why would this test work on Orpheus? Because "men are weak". That's all you get here.
And then in the climax scene when Orpheus and Eurydice leave, the show still refuses to let Orpheus speak for himself. Instead, The Fates sing this number. Perhaps they were supposed to be articulating Orpheus's thoughts, but it all comes across as them taunting and mocking him. Nothing in the lyrics or libretto really explain what is happening. Instead of Orpheus saying he can't hear Eurydice, The Fates are all "ooh, where is she?". It doesn't help that Eurydice is actually loudly singing in this scene. There are maybe 2-3 spoken lines where Orpheus says he's not sure this isn't a trick. But, as a reminder, this show hasn't established WHY Hades wouldn't want to let him leave! So why would he think this is a trick? The show doesn't really tell you, and it is certainly not any of the details from the actual myth.
And WOW, the climax of this show where Eurydice is taken back to the underworld is insanely underwhelming. There is no real attempt to dramatize this. It's like, "shrug, well, that happened". Wow.
So, I'm sitting there pondering all of this when the Narrator comes back and tells us all sorry, that's how the story goes. And then tells us we tell these tragedies because each time we hope it will turn out differently. And the tone of this is weirdly upbeat, like, "ah yes, isn't this fulfilling! Let's do it again! Yay!" And this seems to be the point?
I read later that the writer of this originally intended it as a concept album. And that would likely explain the vagueness of the lyrics, the shifts in who is speaking, and the seeming lack of POV/purpose in storytelling. It'd probably make a fun album, honestly. The music is a pretty fun blend of folk and jazz.
I don't know, though. As a show, this was a giant mess. Hades/Persephone part of the show = Grade B+ Orpheus/Eurydice part = Grade D, because it was too dull to rate an F.
|
|
|
Post by *Deep, Pained Sigh* on May 3, 2022 18:24:38 GMT -5
i am seeing tool and brass against next tuesday (10/5)
|
|
|
Post by ganews on May 11, 2022 16:47:44 GMT -5
Invisible Goat Arcade Fire is playing DC with Beck opening doing an acoustic set. Tickets for October go on sale Friday. Should I buy? I like Arcade Fire fine but I wonder if it's Beck playing 45 minutes of songs that aren't on Mutations like I want.
|
|
|
Post by Desert Dweller on May 15, 2022 21:31:28 GMT -5
Invisible Goat Arcade Fire is playing DC with Beck opening doing an acoustic set. Tickets for October go on sale Friday. Should I buy? I like Arcade Fire fine but I wonder if it's Beck playing 45 minutes of songs that aren't on Mutations like I want.
I saw Beck open for.... someone? :checking log: It was U2 in 2017. He was predictably great. Really great. Probably my one chance to see Beck play a stadium show. Definitely no songs from Mutations, though. Sorry.
However, he played several songs from Sea Change and Morning Phase, and those were all great. So an acoustic set should be good.
|
|
|
Post by *Deep, Pained Sigh* on May 25, 2022 16:45:16 GMT -5
going to see thou on july 6
|
|
LazBro
Prolific Poster
Posts: 10,049
|
Post by LazBro on Jun 10, 2022 8:43:23 GMT -5
Unless something happens along sooner, or it's cancelled, my first concert of pandemic life will be this July. Coheed and Cambria, with Dance Gavin Dance (shut up I like them) and Mothica. Not excited about the "amphitheater show in Texas in the middle of summer" part of it, but very excited for the show itself. Ugh, so the clean singer of Dance Gavin Dance was recently accused of inappropriate behavior with underage fans on a recent tour. He's been fired by the band, who still planned to keep all tour dates with a TBA replacement singer. But Coheed then announced they've removed DGD from the tour.
And I get it. I can't blame them. Even if only one member of DGD has been accused, and that member has been removed, there's still a stigma there, and touring with them less than a month after it went down ... I get it. I'm also really bummed. Dance Gavin Dance are one of my favorite bands (shut up I like them) and this was going to be my first time ever seeing them live. And what's worse, they've been replaced on the tour by fuggin' Alkaline Trio. Not interested.
Coheed are my favorite band and reason enough to sit through any opening act, but this has been a massive downgrade to my excitement for this one.
|
|
|
Post by Djse (and a Sack of Cats) on Jun 13, 2022 23:10:16 GMT -5
Northwest Terror Fest is happening in less than two weeks, and I've got a weekend pass. Vax required, masks recommended. Nervously excited, or excitedly nervous? Yes. northwestterrorfest.com/lineup/
|
|
|
Post by pantsgoblin on Jun 20, 2022 8:53:29 GMT -5
Fun outdoor show by one of my favorite turntablists, Cut Chemist, who performed with his old Jurassic 5 cohort, rapper Chali 2na, as part of a Juneteenth celebration.
|
|
|
Post by MyNameIsNoneOfYourGoddamnBusin on Jun 25, 2022 7:01:04 GMT -5
Ugh, so the clean singer of Dance Gavin Dance was recently accused of inappropriate behavior with underage fans on a recent tour. He's been fired by the band, who still planned to keep all tour dates with a TBA replacement singer. But Coheed then announced they've removed DGD from the tour.
And I get it. I can't blame them. Even if only one member of DGD has been accused, and that member has been removed, there's still a stigma there, and touring with them less than a month after it went down ... I get it. I'm also really bummed. Dance Gavin Dance are one of my favorite bands (shut up I like them) and this was going to be my first time ever seeing them live. And what's worse, they've been replaced on the tour by fuggin' Alkaline Trio. Not interested.
Coheed are my favorite band and reason enough to sit through any opening act, but this has been a massive downgrade to my excitement for this one.
They've booked a headlining club tour for around the same time and will probably announce dates in a week or two.
|
|