The arguments for and against streaming have and will rage for a lot longer than I’ll be bothered to partake of them. Noel Gallagher recently pointed out “someone tried to sell me Spotify once and I was like, ‘Why would I want the entire fucking catalogue of the Kaiser Chiefs?” – though his argument of ‘if I want music I’ll buy it’ doesn’t necessarily work when not everyone has sold 40 million albums (not to mention the presence of his own music on the platform and that I don’t really want / need access to Dig Out Yer Soul)
There’s also the argument that the availability of so much music in one place means that archival releases and collections are diminishing – everything is already there but you have to find it first.
I’m not even going to touch the money / artist’s pay issue.
Anyway, I digress. This was supposed to be a quick one. So let’s call this rant “Advantages of Spotify, Example 53.8”
Pink Floyd’s complete* discography is now there for streaming
This includes The Final Cut
I haven’t had to fork over cash in order to hear this, now, for the first time in full
It’s cost me nothing to discover that a) it’s almost** a complete turd of an album and b) it’s a bloody good thing Gilmour kept the band going and this wasn’t it’s final release
I’ve now heard the sole exception to the above. Not Now John is the only track on the album to feature Gilmour’s vocals and obvious involvement. It’s no wonder it was the lead only single released from it. It’s also a worthy and bafflingly-overlooked addition to any Pink Floyd compilation and I can’t help but enjoy hearing Mr Gilmour sing, with obvious relish “fuck all that” and wonder if, to his mind, he wasn’t singing about all the tosh that had preceded this song’s placement at the arse end of an arse of an album. Arse.
** The Flethcher Memorial Home is alright. Though only thanks to Gilmour’s guitar arriving to pull the turgid lump away from Waters’ unconvincing wailing and When The Tigers Broke Free isn’t too bad either but that’s about it. Yep. That’s about it.
There are some real simple / guilty pleasures in my music collection. They might not be ‘critical’ favourites but I’ll always stick em on.
MTV has a lot to answer for. That’s the MTV that used to be – the one that actually showed more music than reality TV. I can’t say that I’ve watched it for years. Back in the 90’s it was a gateway into a lot of music. For me, in amidst all the “holy shit” moments that came with the explosion of grunge, the video for Aerosmith’s Livin’ On The Edge was an attention grabber – Joe Perry wringing a solo out of his guitar as a freight-train barrels down on him, only to casually step out of the way all cool-as-fuck.
A few years later when the video for Falling In Love (Is Hard On The Knees) aired I went out and got the CD single (again, almost a defunct format now) but listened more to the b-sides instead – Seasons of Wither and Sweet Emotion. It was like a taster for the early Aerosmith. So, after Big Ones I went right back to the music shop (again, a chain that has long since been relegated to the “do you remember?” list) and picked up Rocksthe next day. It got, and gets, a lot more plays than that sumo-wrestler featuring comp.
Jim over at Music Enthusiast (I really need to update my blogroll etc) just finished a great 3-post wrap-up covering Aerosmith and it got me thinking about my own Aerosmith favourites. It wasn’t a deep thought, mind, as back in the days of cassettes I’d already compiled a couple for the car and – though they were on the old 90 minutes cassette and a touch of trimming was required – then done the same with CD. And, now, Spotify.
But why a self-compile in the first place? This is a band with 12 compilations to their 15 studio releases. Chiefly the length of Aerosmith’s career (now at 40+ years and counting) and the switch in record labels from Columbia to Geffen and then back meant that there was no one-stop album that would compile both until 2002’s disappointing compilation (odd song selection, ‘remix’ tracks in the running order, reeked of cash-grab) and those volumes that covered either chapter – let’s call it Pre and Post-Milk Spillage – were a little short on the run time and, therefore, missed a lot of key tracks for my tastes.
Those tracks that were cut off to fit on a CD-length comp were Downtown Charlie and Shithouse Shuffle and a longer, live version of Chip Away At The Stone replaced the studio version here. A few of these tracks (Train and Same Old Song And Dance) most definitely fare better in a live setting but that’s the way it is. Lightning Strikes or Jailbait from Rock In A Hard Place made the cut when there was more tape space but when faced with cutting for length they simply don’t hold up to the rest. Listening through this again now what strikes me most about this part of Aerosmith’s career is the rawness of the sound. Their later work would have a tendency to be more slick and over-produced in its sound as they sought the higher echelons of the chart. Prior to sobriety I guess they just wanted to tear the arse off the place.
So – here’s the slightly trimmed compilation I’ve been spinning in one form or another for the last decade or two from those early days. Starting with what has to be their greatest lead-in to a track, covering personal favourites like Seasons of Wither and the first Tyler/Perry collaboration Movin’ Out before concluding with the biographical No Surprize and, of course, Dream On:
This isn’t quite a Tracks post but the way it’s going it could well be. This is more of a “how the hell had I missed this?!” post.
My wife and I have been getting back to watching TV lately – well, more bingeing on box sets of Mad Men – after the haze of tiptoeing at night so as not to wake the little man. It gave me a desire to re-watch a bit of House again too and I was watching the episode “The Down Low” and, true to form with that show (there’s an awful lot of good music used there) the tune that played out over the conclusion was a belter. Only thing was I didn’t a) recall the episode or b) know the music – but I sat up in my chair, rewound it so that I could both get the name of the track and hear it again.
It was Maggot Brain by Funkadelic. Spotify was calling.
I mean; holy shit. This is just fucking awesome. I’m gob-smacked I’d not heard this before. To quote Wikipedia “The original recording of the song, over ten minutes long, features little more than a spoken introduction and a much-praised extended guitar solo by Eddie Hazel”. Just listening to it you can hear how many players it influenced, careers it started, bands that owe it their existence. I don’t think it would be a stretch to point to the George Clinton connection and say that the Red Hot Chili Peppers probably owe everything about their music that isn’t Kiedis finding a new rhyme for “Dope dick” to these 10 minutes.
Rolling Stone, in their entry for Eddie Hazel in their 100 Greatest Guitarists list said this:
Legend has it that funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain,” the 10-minute solo that turned the late Eddie Hazel into an instant guitar icon, was born when George Clinton told him to imagine hearing his mother just died – and then learning that she was, in fact, alive. Hazel, who died of liver failure in 1992 at age 42, brought a thrilling mix of lysergic vision and groove power to all of his work, inspiring followers like J Mascis, Mike McCready and Lenny Kravitz. “That solo – Lord have mercy!” says Kravitz of “Maggot Brain.” “He was absolutely stunning.”
Gotta be thankful for the ‘digital age’ of music here – otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to have heard the full thing by now (I watched that episode on Saturday) or found this version with Pearl Jam (and the RHCP’s Chad Smith on drums) seguing from Little Wing into Maggot Brain.
While my head’s been spinning over recent political events, it doesn’t mean my turntable hasn’t been.
So as part of my continued effort to break the habit of being lured into depressing and nerve ruining news stories I’m gonna drop down a few thoughts on those albums that have been getting the most of my ears lately.
Mogwai – Atomic
I’ve said this a few times and I’ll keep saying it; I fucking love Mogwai. Their soundtrack work often has a habit of being some of their best (see Zidane and Les Revenants). Atomic is technically but not totally a soundtrack as it comprises material reworked from their contributions to a BBC4 documentary “Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise” about the Hiroshima nuclear bomb and its legacy. As with their previous soundtracks I’ve not seen that which this music scores – nor do I feel up to it right now to be honest – but, again in common with those, it’s not a requirement as Atomic functions as a wonderful, often ethereal and continually beautiful and surprising Mogwai album in its own right. There’s less ‘rock’ on here, instead it’s an album of poignant textures and a blend of hope and fear, death and life.
Here’s Ether from it:
Minor Victories – Minor Victories
Keeping with the Mogwai love as Stuart Braithwaite here steps away from those Glaswegian post-rock legends to join Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, The Editors’ Justin Lockey and his brother James in a new project, Minor Victories. I’d had this on pre-order since the album and lead track were revealed and was not disappointed by the album. The oddest thing about this album is that at no point did all members record together yet they sound like a new band, not “a bit like Slowdive, a bit like Mogwai” but a new, brilliant sound that crackles with a taut electricity and energy that belies the distance between members during its construction. It’s alive with brooding drama and cinematic sweeps with Goswell’s vocals floating above in the mix with the only odd step coming with “For You Always” which features Goswell duetting with Mark Kozelek. How you feel about it will depend on how whether you like his current “steam of consciousness, verbal diarrhoea” approach to lyrics. Or his continued examples of douchebaggery. That aside, this album is one of the year’s best for me and has barely left the car cd player.
Here’s Folk Arp:
Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool
The grammatically questionable title aside, I love this album. I didn’t like King of Limbs; maybe listened to it in full just the once. Yet this…. from the opening rococo strings and paranoid urgency of ‘Burn The Witch’ to the echo-dripping reverb combo of piano and voice on closer ‘True Love Waits’ (a much stronger and far more powerful take than that which appeared years before) with Thom Yorke’s evocative “Just don’t leave, don’t leave” plea, this album is their best for some time. It’s more personal (Yorke having recently separated from his partner of 23 years and mother to his children), delicate piece which gives the sense of the band rediscovering beauty over the angles that have been dominant in more recent work.
Gary Clark Jr – Live
Still, given recent events, I had to make a change up and give the likes of Radiohead and Mogwai a little rest and find something more upbeat to try and get moving that way.
As such I returned to this. I’ve already spoken as to how I came to find Gary Clark Jr’s music so won’t repeat myself. This album though is still a go-to. On record I don’t think Gary has yet to find either the right producer or set-up to do his intensity and playing justice. Blak and Blu was a strong start and last year’s The Story of Sonny Boy Slim had some genuine highlight’s but wandered a little too all-over and lacked the potency he can get across with his guitar on a stage. Obviously that’s not an issue with this 2014 double wallop of great playing. The first time I heard it I was unable to sit still. I’m still not able to sit still when hearing it and nor can my two-year-old son, it’s a guaranteed way to get some bad dad-dancing going. There’s not many that can touch him when it comes to blues guitar and tracks like ‘Numb‘ and ‘Don’t Owe You A Thang’ show he’s got a shed load more in him than standards and Hendrix covers.
What a terrible, terrible result greeted those of sane mind on Friday morning.
I’m still in a state of shock and find myself hoping that somehow this nightmare can be halted, the damage curbed and sensibility prevail. As Bob Pollard says “Everybody’s got a hold on hope, it’s the last thing that’s holding me.”
So I’ve been in a state that I can only liken to a hangover, a walking dream of fuzzy-headed lack of comprehension. Life has had some real positives since but I was locked down by the impact of what Out could mean. I’m starting to shake that off, step away from the bar and get some distance, level-headedness again and so to try and push that along and get back to something resembling normality I pinged a message to a friend: “Out of Euope; Top five songs by European Artists”.
A sort of ‘here’s what we’re gonna lose’ type thing.
This was mine:
Sigur Ros – Starálfur
I could’ve gone with practically anything from this band. At the top of the tree, though, would be either this or #1 Untitled from () which gives me goosebumps each time I hear the start but this one, with it’s palindromic strings, means a whole lot to me.
Refused – New Noise
Can I scream?
Noir Desir – Un Jour En France
There’s a huge amount of controversy about whether it’s still ok to listen to this band. I’m not going to go into it or even dare to pretend I can offer an opinion as it’s one of those that leaves me startled.
For myself, though, Noir Desir represent something of a happy memory. When my now-wife and I were dating and living in Paris I remember being stuck in traffic on the périphérique and then, amidst all the usual dross on the radio that was removed from what I could tune into, hearing a heavier, rocking sound. It was this. I came to hear them after Bertrand Cantat was already in prison so my enjoyment of them (songs like Lost or Le vent nous portera and Tostaky (Le continent)) is more tied to my own time in France and with my wife than anything else.
Girls In Hawaii – Misses
Girls In Hawaii are a Belgian band and another that remind me of my time in France as it was my wife who get me into them while she was still living there and we’d played their first album almost non-stop on our first holiday together while driving around Normandy – you can kind of get the idea as to why the Leave vote is such a hard one to bear. They’re a cracking little band who sadly lost their drummer in a car accident after recording their second album. This track, the first new material they released some years after his death, is undoubtedly connected and all the more affective as a result.
Cardigans – My Favourite Game
Because this was everywhere at the tail end of the 90s and re-introduced the band that everyone was tired of after the overplaying of Lovefool. A great album too.
So that’s my list. It’s not perfect, and it was a spontaneous one. If I’m in an editing / revising one I know already I can saw there’s two Swedish acts there, no Last Days of April, no Air and no Nouveau Western which deserves more than an honourable mention of only for its video. But then I could, and may, just as easily do a Top 5 for some of the EU countries alone.
However, yes, along with Nouveau Western I’ll add some honourable mentions for:
Just look at the list of Beatles songs that are his… If I Needed Someone, Taxman, I Want To Tell You, Within You Without You, Something, Piggies, that perennial herald of warmer weather Here Comes The Sun and While My Guitar Gently Weeps(!) to name but a few…
Granted, he happened to be in band with two other blokes who were quite handy with a tune so songs that would otherwise have been guaranteed single selections weren’t considered worthy enough. So instead of a scathing swipe at HMRC and a catchy-as-the-flu hook or a beauty of a tune about the dangers of overloading your brain with too many ideas at one time they released the one where the drummer intoned about living in a questionably-coloured underwater boat.
Still, after a couple of non-traditional solo releases while the band were still active, when the Beatles officially called it a day in 1970 (Lennon had called it quits the previous year) the foot had been taken off the hose pipe for George and he released the triple album All Things Must Pass – itself a gorgeous song that the rest of the Beatles had passed on (the berks) – in October.
All Things Must Pass is full to the brim with great songs, some of George’s very best are here: I’d Have You Anytime, My Sweet Lord, Isn’t It A Pity, What Is Life, All Things Must Pass, Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll) and, of course, Beware of Darkness.
Beware of Darkness has some pretty dense and dark imagery in the lyrics, wonderfully offset by some beautiful yet complex instrumentation (with a shift from G major to G sharp minor that really shouldn’t work but does so brilliantly) and George’s genuinely affirming words. Harrison was himself on a perpetual quest for peace and, religion aside, his spirituality and the solace he seeks to find within it are at the forefront in this one and whether you get on that wave yourself or not there’s no denying the sincerity of his vocal.
I can’t express how much I love this song, to be honest. It’s one of my go-to tunes when I hear that black dog barking in a far off field and is one of my own coping techniques when I worry it might get closer. I’ll drop this on and then, if it’s one of those days, follow it up with another Harrison related tune from the Python boys.
Undoubtedly a song that’s all over the airwaves and social media today but…. this post was in the works already and it seems fitting enough to push it through now.
Heading home yesterday evening I flipped open twitter and caught the rumours of Prince’s death before confirmation from his publicist changed it into a breaking news story. Shocking doesn’t do it justice.
It’s hard to recall the first Prince song I heard / knew. He was everywhere in music in the 80’s and into the 90’s. Nobody had such a prolific period of constant hits and a career-long streak of strong music.
I do know, though, that Purple Rain remains an ice-cold slab of perfection. There’s not a track on the album I skip. From the hit singles it generated to the breathlessness of Take Me With U, the brilliance of Darling Nikki and the pure Prince audacity-fuck censorship of its lyrics there’s just so many moments of genius on it you could lose count. No wonder it’s shifted upwards of 20 million copies.
For me though, the album, and Prince’s highlight is it’s opening track – Let’s Go Crazy.
It encapsulates everything that the album holds all contained in one four-and-a-half minte track – there’s the exultant chorus, the near-gospel backing vocals, urgent synths, and, of course, Prince’s startling guitar chops (for further evidence watch the little guy in the hat break this cover out of mundaity). This has been a go-to song for me for a long time, those times when the day has been a pile of cack, it’s time for Let’s Go Crazy. It’s impossible to not be uplifted by it, with the sermonising intro with it’s “Dearly beloved…” (boy have I seen that a lot on twitter today) and it’s rousing “and if the elevator tries to bring you down… go crazy; punch a higher floor”. Yeah… Prince is probably trying to evangelisize us with this one but, fuck me, it’s as catchy and brilliant as they come. It’s a pure rush of excitement listening to it especially when – in album format – it breaks into the start of Take Me With U and its opening drum solo.
Thanks to the Purple One’s very tight hold on his copyrights and sharing etc it’s hard to find a video to put here (or one that will stay active for longer than a fart) but let’s try:
Compilations are a funny thing. You’re never going to please everyone but, in theory, you need to give a good reason for existing fans to buy (and a hastily recorded or re-recorded track not considered good enough for the previous album doesn’t count) and enough solid quality to give a career-overview for new / cursory fans to get hooked.
Some people go as far as to turn their nose up at them. Yet I’ve used a ‘Best of’ to get into a fair few bands over the years (Asides from Buffalo Tom remains one of my most-played discs).
When it comes to grabbing compilations from bands I already hold the back catalogue of, I don’t tend to go the Best Of or Introduction To route. Especially on those groups or individuals that are no longer active. Yet I’ll still want a compilation – especially for car use – for those times I don’t particularly want to listen to just one specific album. The problem is, though, that my choice of what I’d consider essential listening very rarely coincides completely with the ‘official’ compiler’s (usually because they’re doing so with a specific aim rather than just cherry picking). So that’s when the old adage “if you want a job done right do it yourself” comes into play and I’ve a fair few of these home-made comps so far.
With the use of Spotify I can even share these here.
So here we go with the first.
Oddly enough the need for a self-compiled disc of The Beatles doesn’t quite fit the ramble above. I don’t own anything from their back catalogue (with the exception of The Magical Mystery Tour). Yet their output is so large that there’s a number of different compilations out there, again each with a different purpose – 1 obviously the chart-toppers, The Past Masters and Anthology seemed too wide-ranging for a good, succinct compilation. 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 came closest but again contained a lot of stuff that I didn’t really care for and when you consider the pricing of all releases Fab Four themed… no thanks. It’s worth noting that this compilation was created before they deigned to allow their songs available via iTunes and streaming so the borrowing of CDs to create this was necessitated (and no piracy was involved) – to be honest though I’d still do so as the idea of paying the required for the whole still makes me flinch.
I’m not a huge Beatles fan. I like a lot of their songs a lot, though, and enjoy them more as I get older, yet I could quite happily never hear some of their earlier stuff again.
So, my choice of Beatles tracks, and the compilation that I’ve kept in my car for some years now also serves as a “my favourite Beatles songs” list – all wrapped around the centrepiece of the amazing While My Guitar Gently Weeps… *
*Yes; George was the best Beatle. You might argue but you’d be wrong.
It was Come Pick Me Up that I heard first. Again on a monthly music magazine’s free CD. It seems a lifetime ago that I clogged my bookshelves with the print of the music press but there was some golden discoveries made there nonetheless and Ryan Adams’ first album was one.
As such I grabbed his second album Gold upon day of release. It’s one of those aiming-for-great albums that, while it doesn’t quite make it, you can’t help but feel the quality and ambition and think, fuck, there’s a whole lot of talent and potential here that’s only going to get better. But then the hype for this ‘next best thing’ derailed the train and it was some time before the dust settled, if it ever did.
Now Adams’ musical career, it’s ups and downs (though Rock ‘n’ Roll isn’t too bad), battles with Lost Highway and directions has been well and better documented elsewhere so I won’t assume that I can do is justice. There’s a few versions of Ryan Adams – there’s the alt. country of his début Heartbreaker, there’s the Cardinals-leading swagger of Cold Roses, the hushed acoustics of Ashes & Fire and even the heavy metal of Orion – all of which seemed to meld (save the latter) in the confident and hugely accessible recent, self-titled album.
For me, though, it’s those seemingly-simple but gently and subtly sneaky songs like Come Pick Me Up (with lyrics like “I wish you would, come pick me up, take me out, fuck me up, steal my records, screw all my friends….) that lure the listener in to something darker lurking beneath the surface that are his best.
My favourite is La Cienega Just Smiled.
Such a gentle, growing melody. Instantly hooking and soothing but there’s so much more there. The imagery is instantly simple and casual “on with the jeans, the jacket and the shirt” but then there’s the lines like “I’m too scared to know how I feel about you now” and “one breaks my body and the other breaks my soul”… all brushed off with “see you around”.
Ryan Adams has an arsenal of songs about being broken by love and/or drink/drugs but none of them, to my mind (and it’s my blog) as beautifully crafted and affecting as this:
Somewhere back in time when I started this blog I mentioned that I was toying with a post on the ultimate Pearl Jam set-list.
Pearl Jam live are a wonderful thing. Gallingly, though, I’ve only seen them live once. They seem to have now joined the list of great bands that consider playing at Milton Keynes and Leeds as a UK tour – what happened to the rest of the country? – and have given up playing at Wembley Arena (where I saw them on the Binaural tour).
A year or so back I read a great piece that stated: “Pearl Jam is known as one of the best live acts in its arena-filling weight class. After only fitfully listening to new Pearl Jam albums for more than a decade, seeing the band live reignited my interest in listening to them again. Pearl Jam will remain interesting to people for as long as it is able to tour.”
I genuinely believe that there’s not many acts that can touch them live in terms of quality, consistency and pure excitement. And, while I’m unlikely to be in the audience any time soon (their 25th Anniversary trek this year is limited to US/Canadian shows) there’s still plenty of opportunity to enjoy them live thanks to the unusual decision they took back in 2000 – the same tour I caught them on – to release an “official bootleg” of every (with a couple of exceptions) show to offer fans the opportunity to get a good-quality audio of each concert for a reasonable price.
Now…. given how many shows they play a year and that it’s been going for close to 16 years… that’s a lot of shows to choose from. I’m gob-smacked at the idea that some people own the lot.
I’ve got…. a few. Physically; just the show that I attended. I can always claim I’m on a Pearl Jam album that way.
On the iPod, however… well that’s a different story.
There’s probably a dozen or so. Some purchased legitimately and others… in the truer nature of Bootlegs. And each one of them is different and worth having in their own right. See, the thing is I got given the amazing PJ20 book one year – along with the DVD and soundtrack – and there’s mention of so many great shows that it’s impossible not to at least check some of the more significant ones out. Like the 2003 show in Uniondale when the band were heckled for their performance of Bushleaguer:
Which pisses Vedder off so much it’s apparent in the cover of The Clash’s Know Your Rights that follows.
I also have the trioofshows they played at the Tweeter Center in Boston that same year where they used the opportunity to play every song they’d played on the tour to at that point over the course of the three shows; 82 originals and 12 covers with only one repeat….
But to get to the original point; I’ve been hunting for that recording that, to me, represents the ultimate set list.
Back in 2012 (pre-Lightning Bolt), Eddie Vedder let a fan club contest winner choose the setlist for a show. Now the set that Brian Farias – for it was he – chose was pretty good. He even managed to get Vedder to play Bugs for only the second time. But it’s a big challenge, really… how to find the right balance.
I, for example, would want to hear a lot of deeper cuts. But then, looking back at the quote up top of this ramble, how would that play at a show when not all in attendance know every Pearl Jam song. So you do have to mix in the ‘hits’ as it were and – while I don’t always listen to it – Better Man always gets the crowd going and becomes something else live than on record.
Then there’s the case that Pearl Jam don’t do Greatest Hits tours and are usually touring in support of a new album. So what of the newer songs make the grade and still manage to keep the crowd going. In all honesty I wouldn’t really pluck a show from the Backspacer tour because I don’t really feel a lot of tracks from that album worked in that context.
Lightning Bolt, however, was a much stronger effort and there was a lot of stuff I was itching to hear live. Factor in the fact that the band were in great shape and playing better than ever, there’s a lot of gems to be found in the Lightning Bolt tour bootlegs.
So I think I’ve now been able to find the ‘perfect’ set list / bootleg. Well, sort of. Because there’s two.
Worchester, MA, October 15th 2013 is a 32 song strong set that packs in Leash (not as ferocious as I’d love to hear it played but I’ve yet to find a recording that does play it quite as strong as it could be and this one has a great story that precedes it), Red Mosquito and Man of the Hour along with newer cuts like Swallowed Hole and Infallible along with the tour-set-list regulars Mind Your Manners and Sirens. The energy picks up after a quieter start and there’s a great performance of Nothing As It Seems, Fatal gets a play in the first Encore and Crazy Mary makes an appearance. Oh, and Last Kiss.
(I love the moment at about 1:35 where someone realises it’s Leash and gives a joyous yelp)
Set: Release, Long Road, Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town, Lightning Bolt, Mind Your Manners, Hail, Hail, Sirens, Even Flow, Nothing As it Seems, Swallowed Whole, Red Mosquito, Whipping, Corduroy, Infallible, Got Some, Save You, Leash, Let The Records Play,
Do The Evolution, Better Man.
Encore 1: Man Of The Hour, Yellow Moon, Fatal, Just Breathe, Spin The Black Circle, Unthought Known, Porch.
Encore 2: Last Kiss, Crazy Mary, Alive, Sonic Reducer, Indifference.
Meanwhile the tour closer at the Key Arena in Seattle on December 3rd finds the band in an even stronger form, the energy is high and they’re playing to a home-crowd. So tracks like Let Me Sleep, In My Tree and Pilate get pulled out, there’s better banter, Breath, State of Love and Trust, a story from Ed of how he was nearly lost at sea, Chloe Dancer / Crown of Thorns, Pendulum opens and Mike McCready playing Van Halen’s Eruption into Yellow Ledbetter brings the show to a close after 37 songs.
Turns out there’s a video of the whole show ‘out there’ which I’ll leave here as long as it lasts:
Set: Pendulum, Nothingman, Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town, Interstellar Overdrive, Corduroy, Lightning Bolt, Mind Your Manners, Given To Fly, Pilate, Garden, Getaway, Even Flow, Sirens, In My Tree, Do The Evolution, Unthought Known, Black, Let The Records Play
Spin The Black Circle, Lukin, Better Man.
Encore 1: After Hours, Let Me Sleep,Future Days, Daughter, Chloe Dancer, Crown Of Thorns, Breath, State Of Love And Trust, Porch.
Encore 2: Supersonic, Got Some, Rearviewmirror, Alive, Kick Out The Jams, Eruption, Yellow Ledbetter.
So yeah; I think, between those two it’s as close to a perfect set-list / show recording as you’ll get. A good mix of the deeper cuts, the crowd pleasures, strong new material and plenty of Vedder’s stories and not a heckle in ear-shot.
Although I’ve not yet heard the show with No Code played in full or…..
Mumbling About... 