Weezer, Angels And Airwaves, and Tokyo Police Club
Reliant Arena
Houston, TX
October 23rd, 2008
I also interviewed Weezer earlier in the week before the show.
Admittedly, I was quite dubious entering the venue for this show. I’ve never been a fan of Weezer (much less anything that Tom DeLonge has been associated with), but I have heard that Mr. Cuomo and Company put on quite a spectacular live show and I was curious to see how they was going to pull of the “Hootenanny” aspect of the show about which I had heard so much. However, being the people-watcher that I am, I was quite excited to see the crowd sing the better-known tracks from the Weezer canon at the top of their lungs. Going to shows is the music geek version of living with a primitive tribal culture to conduct anthropological field studies, and in my case, my predictions were borne out to be true. There were well-dressed young adults (Prada and Coach bags at a rock show?) reliving a bit of their youth through music; dorky, Peter Pan-ish 30-something males whose musical tastes have never grown up; and gobs of young, can’t-drive-yet Weezer-loving adolescents toting around their sweater-wearing (irony alert!) parents. I would guess that any band who’s been around for fifteen-plus years with six full-length albums to their credit would attract such a demographically diverse crowd.
But in terms of the actual music, Canadian four-piece Tokyo Police Club opened up the show with their brand of catchy, fuzzy alt-pop and played to a venue that was barely 20% full. It was actually a bit sad – the boys were playing their little hearts out while everyone (except for the five random diehards in the very front of the stage) was milling about talking during their set. The band looked a bit lonely on stage; while they were having fun with their music, but they also seemed to have resigned themselves to show openers, which makes sense, as the tour was three shows from its conclusion. There was simply very little crowd energy and the empty arena was filled up with random crowd noise and talking, not the music. Tokyo Police Club might be used to playing smaller venues, but they apparently need to learn how to interact with their crowds, as they didn’t do much more than play their songs and get off the stage when their set time was over.
After a thirty-minute intermission (Do all big-name tours keep to such a firm time schedule for each band’s set?), Angels And Airwaves took the stage, complete with a bay of guitars and guitar tech each for the guitarist and bassist and some minor scaffolding so that Tom DeLonge could strut about during certain parts of songs. The crowd responded a bit more often with this band’ set, but that’s probably because the venue finally approached 50% capacity while AVA played. Furthermore, if I were to be completely honest and worth anything as a music critic, I must take this time to declare that this band’s set was completely and utterly boring: not only is their music rehashed arena rock, but Tom pranced about the stage doing his best Bono imitation, only to come across as supremely lame. Maybe the music wouldn’t be so bad if there was an actual tenor singing the songs, as opposed to Tom’s old punk rocker voice, but I might be grasping at straws here.
Thankfully, after another precisely thirty-minute intermission, the lights dimmed, the crowd swelled to 75%, teenaged girls shrieked, men hollered, parents shoved their ear plugs in deeper, and Weezer launched into the music. The crowd’s excitement became palpable, as even most of the sitting folks in the chairs rose to their feet to sing what songs they knew. As a band, Weezer seemed quite accomplished, as much of the live lead singing duties was passed back and forth quite deftly between Rivers, Scott (the bass player), and Brian (the lead guitarist), but a grand sense of fun was pervasive throughout the entire performance. Along with the band changing costumes once, the entire stage was drenched in a subtly impressive light show that never visually dominated the band’s aural show.
Musically, the band played a great portion of their recent album, Red, but also brought the fire and delighted the crowd with their classic material. General highlights of the evening included “Say It Ain’t So,” “Undone – The Sweater Song,” “Troublemaker,” “Automatic,” and “Hash Pipe.” Also, in what proved to be a rather entertaining bit of the show, a group of instrument-wielding teenagers came on stage to perform with Weezer, in what has been advertised and described as a “Hootenanny.” These were kids who had won a contest on the local alternative rock radio station (94.5 FM here in Houston, TX) and were privileged to perform zippy, acoustic versions of “Island In The Sun” (featuring one kid’s soprano saxophone solo) and “Beverly Hills” (complete with the crowd singing the chorus, an alto saxophone solo, and a trumpet solo) with the band. Rivers displayed a wealth of social skills as he played host and band leader for this interlude.
Nevertheless, the truly stand-out portions of the evening serve as testament to Weezer’s place in the contemporary alt-rock pantheon: “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)” concluded the first portion of their night’s music, and, as a big rock song, it outshone the two actual singles from Red; they adroitly (and surprisingly!) performed an exceptional cover of Pink Floyd’s “Time,” complete with Patrick (the drummer) taking over rhythm guitar and lead vocals as Rivers played the drums; and the house was brought down at the very end with a raucous version of (what else?) “Buddy Holly,” wherein even the old people stood up to sing along with the band. In total, while I have always been someone who is in attendance for the entire show he paid for, I can understand, in this instance, why some people only arrived for Weezer: the band definitely provided an outstanding, insanely fun show for their fans (not to mention this somewhat skeptical music critic), one that was more than worth the price of admission.