Did anybody stop to think that even though these setlists are "predictable", that perhaps, just maybe the band was AMAZING when they played them? I can't wait for this Blu-ray.
As someone who follows the live performances and even listens to a few bootlegs, I can testify that these two things are definitely related. The band is playing and sounding so good because they're so well rehearsed.
Take a song like "Surrounded", for example, which pushes James' range to its absolute limits. When they started playing it more frequently, James was kinda everywhere during those high parts, especially the lines directly before and after the solo. Sure, sometimes he'd nail it. But other times he'd get up to those passages and suddenly realize he wasn't going to be able to do it, and then he'd suddenly switch to singing a different melody, without really knowing where he was going with it.
But what I've noticed on recent performances, especially those on this leg, is that James has "settled in" to a standard way of singing it that he seems to be able to pull-off every night. Even though it's a compromise with the album version in some ways, it's still a damn good performance, because it sounds like it's rehearsed and it's supposed to be that way, and it doesn't have that feeling of being a "lukewarm improvisation" that the less well-rehearsed performances from previous tours have been affected by.
Topic: 2012-08-19/20 - Luna Park - Buenos Aires, ARG (being filmed for DVD) (Read 130232 times)