Let’s take a moment today to look over the year in concerts.
Here’s the list of what I saw live in 2018:
U2 (June)
Lake Street Dive with Rubblebucket (July)
Arctic Monkeys (July)
Dispatch (September)
Chvrches (October)
Courtney Barnett (October)
Some scattered notes about these shows:
*The best concert venue from the list was Thompson’s Point in Portland, Maine. This was where Lake Street Dive closed for Rubblebucket and I recommend anyone who enjoys concerts to go here for at least one show. The grassy outdoor space is designed for a show on a perfect summer night and it created the ideal setting for a great concert.
*I didn’t leave the Arctic Monkeys show feeling the band would soon become one of my favorites. I enjoyed myself, of course, but I didn’t share the crowd’s rush of excitement and nostalgia every time the band started playing one of its bigger hits. I got the impression that the band’s newer material was not as well-liked by its core fans based on the different reactions of the crowd (what else is new?) and I confirmed this intuition when I started exploring more of their work in the weeks after the show. As I listened to more of their early work, I found myself getting more into the band’s original sound.
*I was never a big Dispatch fan but I liked the concert. It was at the Blue Hills Bank Pavillion in Boston’s seaport and this is another excellent concert venue. I realized during the show that the band’s best-known song, ‘The General’, is surely among the greatest songs ever and one people will still be listening to fifty years from now.
*The Chvrches show was outstanding and at times I wondered if their concert would cause the Orpheum Theater to burn to the ground. The band has a great stage presence and their performance energized the crowd throughout the night. I was surprised in particular by how much ‘Science/Visions’ and ‘Clearest Blue’ improved in concert and I was not disappointed by performances for the songs I was most looking forward to – ‘Graffiti’, ‘Get Out’, and ‘The Mother We Share’.
*The Courtney Barnett concert was another great show. I went the night after Chvrches and I couldn’t help but make comparisons. The most significant was that although Chvrches had a much better stage presence than Courtney, I thought her musicianship was breathtaking throughout the night. Of all the performers I saw this year, I thought Courtney Barnett playing the guitar was easily the most impressive display of skill and talent. I left the show more impressed by ‘Elevator Operator’ than ever before and thought her performance of ‘Depreston’ was the highlight of the evening.
*Last but not least, the first show I went to is also the one I have the most to say about. Initially, I had a lot more to say – I have a (long) draft for a post sitting around that I’m sure I’ll throw out tomorrow. It’s not that I want to spare you, dear reader, of my three thousand words about U2 – it’s that I just reread my draft and realized it was complete rubbish.
What I understood as I read my draft is that I went to U2 in June expecting much more than a concert yet in the end all I got was… a concert. I’d read in the past, for example, that seeing a U2 show was ‘like watching your life flash before your eyes’ and I recognized how U2 had formed a certain soundtrack in my life during difficult, unusual, or memorable times. I’d spent countless hours scouring Youtube for the most obscure concert clips imaginable and learned in the process that these concerts had the potential for much more than just a nice night listening to favorite music.
But in the end, I felt nothing of this sort during the show and left concluding that it was, indeed, just a concert. The band’s electric performance of ‘I Will Follow’ rolled back the decades while a stripped down version of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ underscored the band’s ability to find new ways of performing its oldest hits. I liked the acoustic performance of ‘Staring At The Sun’, a song the band linked to ‘willful blindness’ and used to state its position against the far right (headline: Bono, U2 against Nazis). In a night perhaps slightly overemphasizing new material, I enjoyed ‘Get Out Of Your Own Way’ and ‘Love Is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way’ and I expect to count these among my favorite U2 songs for years to come. As my friend put it, U2 turned out to be ‘a couple hours of hard rocking’ and what I imagine were our completely different expectations led us to this same final point of agreement at the end of the set.
Overall, the show was simply incredible despite our terrible seats (second to last row, meaning we couldn't even get the benefit of being able to stand whenever we pleased). Of course, with U2 so much more goes into a great show than just the band members – I imagine more was spent on production than at all the other shows I went to this year combined – but it’s also impossible to put on great music without great musicians and that’s what you get anytime U2 comes to town. We would go back in an instant.
