The Mars Volta at Cirkus 30/11
Ikväll var jag på The Mars Voltas spelning här på Cirkus i Stockholm och jag tänkte skriva lite om mina tankar kring den och hur det var. Jag kommer skriva på engelska utifall att det skulle titta in någon som inte kan svenska men som ändå vill läsa om konserten.
So, what I just wrote in the piece above was that I was at the Mars Volta Concert tonight at Cirkus here in Stockholm, and that I'm going to write a little about what I thought about it. And I also wrote that everyone who can't understand swedish smells like doodoobutter (no actually I didn't do that).
Well anyways. The show was to start at 19:30 (that's 7:30 PM) and they let us in at 19:00 (7 PM), I bought tickets for the front area as I was aiming for the front row, but unfortunately I haven't been to these kinda concerts in a while so I didn't really know how early you should be there before they let you in. I still ended up in the front, but not at the fence, so I was in the second row just behind the fencehuggers. This kind of sucked, of course, but I will come to that later. The second thing that put my moral down a bit in the beginning was that TMV was really late to come out on stage, they came out at 20:15 (8:15 PM), I heard from a guy in front of me though that TMV thought the show was to start 20:00 (8 PM) and that that was the reason that they were late. I don't know if it's true, but whatever now. So we had stood there for more than an hour waiting and I have a back problem so it felt like my back was about to snap any moment, lucky for me TMV came out on stage just as it started to become excruciating to stand there.
/End rant about my defected genes.
TMV came out and Cedric freaked around with a broom as he came out, but the most interesting part was to see if Dave Elitch would succeed in replacing Thomas Pridgen, now that he has left (or been kicked out of?) the band. Is he good? Can he take on the extremely difficult drum parts from Bedlam in Goliath songs? Will he work good together with the band when they improvise? The questions were many, but I kind of knew before the concert that he couldn't possibly nail all the crazy shit Pridgen had done before, but maybe he could have another feel on it all. We all know about the discussions on previous drummer in TMV, the classical "Theodore vs. Pridgen" always comes up on youtube-video comments and such from time to time, and I thought that this would be interesting. Sadly Dave Elitch just wasn't all right tonight, right in the beginning I noticed that he couldn't handle (most of) the songs at all and he just looked really strained in every movement. Thomas Pridgens awesomeness just became apparent when Goliath came on, Elitch could't handle the fills and the bass pedal at all so the song just became really flat and kind of boring (even though they tried making it kind of heavy instead with his hard and not so complex drumming), which was sad because Goliath is the most awesome song ever, especially live. What I also noticed was that he didn't really seem to like being there, as I said, he looked strained. I don't know if it is because he knows that he has some heavy shit to try and drum, or if he feels that he is constantly judged by the band on how good he is (which must be increased by the first guess), like a very long audition. After watching youtube-videos on Elitch I know he is good (and really fast), so I'm guessing that he is really nervous or something. But I'm still not sure whether he is the right man for TMV.
/End rant about drummer.
The second thing that was kind of a beat down was that there were only six of them here, and that means no saxomofone. Don't like. But they made a pretty good work with the people there anyway as the most important ones were there. Cedric sang good tonight and had lots of energy (as always), Omar was just Omar - fabulous, and Ikey was as energetically cuddly as ever behind his keyboard. They opened with Son et Lumiere and followed it up with Inertiatic ESP, and after that they did Cotopaxi, in other words a really strong and explosive start of the show. The problem though is that people here in Sweden that go to TMV shows are really lame, and I really don't understand why. The people in the front, the fencehuggers, just stood there and watched it all like they were on a frickin' zoo or something. And everytime I wanted to fuck it up a little bit by singing/screaming the lyrics and dancing, trying to get people along, they just became even more frigid and boring. This of course demoralizes you to even try to liven things up a little, and leaves you hatin' on the fuckers at the fence in front of you.
The thing is that I saw TMV at the Arvika festival earlier this summer, and I was so embarassed on the behalf of the swedish people because everyone was behaving as if they were on a goddamn funeral of some sort. Here we have this kick-ass music and no one dances and sings? What the hell? Fuckin' zombies. But when I went to this concert tonight I was calmed down about this matter since everyone who was gonna be there had bought tickets just to see TMV, which means they are fans. At festivals any idiot can come by and watch a concert and then just leave when they want, but here everyone comes to see this particular band, which made me comfortable about the situation. But the thing is that TMV fans in Sweden seem to be a bit tricky, they are all fire and flames before the concert but when they are actually in front of the band they just wobble about in this awkward "dance" trying to touch Cedric as soon as he comes near them, then back to wobbly "dance" or just looking at the scene. They aren't good at the sing-a-long parts either because either they just don't want to be caught singing out loud or they just don't know the lyrics (okay now I'm hatin', but sometimes I fucking wonder). I don't know if I just had bad luck or if they are all autistic or retards, but I got next to these upper-mid teenagers at my left side, a super-mega-ultra boring couple in front of me and this ADD-kid to the right, freightened by this situation I didn't even want to look behind me just to find a cave-troll or something there. Everyone just boring. (GODDAMNIT I should've been hugging the fence!). And the fun part is that when they all come out from the concert they are all fire and flames again, "oooh it was SO GOOD! ah man wow, bla bla bla", well then at least LOOK like you're having a good time whilst at the goddamn concert! Fucking douchebags.
I am seriously thinking about taking a trip to another country to see TMV there instead of Sweden when they go onto another tour, I'm thinking about going to Polen because TMV said that they love the response they get on their shows in Polen, that there's something special. I just have to try out the theory that we Swedish people sucks as a TMV audience, this can't possibly be how people act to fuckass-awesome music from a fuckass-awesome band. I just can't take it. It would be cool to see a TMV show in America too sometime, that would be the one and only reason for me to travel to that country (I'm sorry America but you're goddamn scary most of the time).
/End rant on how swedish TMV-fans sucks.
It was a good setlist, I don't remember the whole list right now, but it was good. They jammed a lot (I don't really know how much in comparison to other shows, but they jammed however) and the most fabulous part of the show was in their jamming in the middle of Cicatriz ESP, Cedric just does his thing that only he can do, he's fantastic at improvising, and it all just escalates and escalates. It felt just as that fragment of a second before you get an orgasm, but then you take that fragment of a second and extend it into a minute instead, that's exactly how it felt. It was excruciatingly wonderful. They rocked Viscera Eyes really good and in this one I felt that the style of Dave Elitch fit in perfect with his heavy drumming (as to I am curious though, he seems so fast and light in the Youtube-videos, he must be nervous right now).
The thing that's sad at TMV concerts is that they never do an encore, and I don't know if they only diss that in shows when they are disheartened by the audience (Sweden!!), or if they just never do encores at all. I must do research in this matter.
And now follows some ranting about how much I adore Cedric, and that my friends I will take in Swedish because of the level of embarassement of it all at my age of 22.
Cedric var ju såklart helt fantastisk, han är truly teh sex på scen och varenda jävla del av hans kropp bara dansar hur han än gör. ARGH vad jag inte skulle protestera någonstans mot att föda hans barn! Nej nu ska jag lägga mig och drömma lite om hans fina händer och sexiga höfter.
Dröm sött!
So, what I just wrote in the piece above was that I was at the Mars Volta Concert tonight at Cirkus here in Stockholm, and that I'm going to write a little about what I thought about it. And I also wrote that everyone who can't understand swedish smells like doodoobutter (no actually I didn't do that).
Well anyways. The show was to start at 19:30 (that's 7:30 PM) and they let us in at 19:00 (7 PM), I bought tickets for the front area as I was aiming for the front row, but unfortunately I haven't been to these kinda concerts in a while so I didn't really know how early you should be there before they let you in. I still ended up in the front, but not at the fence, so I was in the second row just behind the fencehuggers. This kind of sucked, of course, but I will come to that later. The second thing that put my moral down a bit in the beginning was that TMV was really late to come out on stage, they came out at 20:15 (8:15 PM), I heard from a guy in front of me though that TMV thought the show was to start 20:00 (8 PM) and that that was the reason that they were late. I don't know if it's true, but whatever now. So we had stood there for more than an hour waiting and I have a back problem so it felt like my back was about to snap any moment, lucky for me TMV came out on stage just as it started to become excruciating to stand there.
/End rant about my defected genes.
TMV came out and Cedric freaked around with a broom as he came out, but the most interesting part was to see if Dave Elitch would succeed in replacing Thomas Pridgen, now that he has left (or been kicked out of?) the band. Is he good? Can he take on the extremely difficult drum parts from Bedlam in Goliath songs? Will he work good together with the band when they improvise? The questions were many, but I kind of knew before the concert that he couldn't possibly nail all the crazy shit Pridgen had done before, but maybe he could have another feel on it all. We all know about the discussions on previous drummer in TMV, the classical "Theodore vs. Pridgen" always comes up on youtube-video comments and such from time to time, and I thought that this would be interesting. Sadly Dave Elitch just wasn't all right tonight, right in the beginning I noticed that he couldn't handle (most of) the songs at all and he just looked really strained in every movement. Thomas Pridgens awesomeness just became apparent when Goliath came on, Elitch could't handle the fills and the bass pedal at all so the song just became really flat and kind of boring (even though they tried making it kind of heavy instead with his hard and not so complex drumming), which was sad because Goliath is the most awesome song ever, especially live. What I also noticed was that he didn't really seem to like being there, as I said, he looked strained. I don't know if it is because he knows that he has some heavy shit to try and drum, or if he feels that he is constantly judged by the band on how good he is (which must be increased by the first guess), like a very long audition. After watching youtube-videos on Elitch I know he is good (and really fast), so I'm guessing that he is really nervous or something. But I'm still not sure whether he is the right man for TMV.
/End rant about drummer.
The second thing that was kind of a beat down was that there were only six of them here, and that means no saxomofone. Don't like. But they made a pretty good work with the people there anyway as the most important ones were there. Cedric sang good tonight and had lots of energy (as always), Omar was just Omar - fabulous, and Ikey was as energetically cuddly as ever behind his keyboard. They opened with Son et Lumiere and followed it up with Inertiatic ESP, and after that they did Cotopaxi, in other words a really strong and explosive start of the show. The problem though is that people here in Sweden that go to TMV shows are really lame, and I really don't understand why. The people in the front, the fencehuggers, just stood there and watched it all like they were on a frickin' zoo or something. And everytime I wanted to fuck it up a little bit by singing/screaming the lyrics and dancing, trying to get people along, they just became even more frigid and boring. This of course demoralizes you to even try to liven things up a little, and leaves you hatin' on the fuckers at the fence in front of you.
The thing is that I saw TMV at the Arvika festival earlier this summer, and I was so embarassed on the behalf of the swedish people because everyone was behaving as if they were on a goddamn funeral of some sort. Here we have this kick-ass music and no one dances and sings? What the hell? Fuckin' zombies. But when I went to this concert tonight I was calmed down about this matter since everyone who was gonna be there had bought tickets just to see TMV, which means they are fans. At festivals any idiot can come by and watch a concert and then just leave when they want, but here everyone comes to see this particular band, which made me comfortable about the situation. But the thing is that TMV fans in Sweden seem to be a bit tricky, they are all fire and flames before the concert but when they are actually in front of the band they just wobble about in this awkward "dance" trying to touch Cedric as soon as he comes near them, then back to wobbly "dance" or just looking at the scene. They aren't good at the sing-a-long parts either because either they just don't want to be caught singing out loud or they just don't know the lyrics (okay now I'm hatin', but sometimes I fucking wonder). I don't know if I just had bad luck or if they are all autistic or retards, but I got next to these upper-mid teenagers at my left side, a super-mega-ultra boring couple in front of me and this ADD-kid to the right, freightened by this situation I didn't even want to look behind me just to find a cave-troll or something there. Everyone just boring. (GODDAMNIT I should've been hugging the fence!). And the fun part is that when they all come out from the concert they are all fire and flames again, "oooh it was SO GOOD! ah man wow, bla bla bla", well then at least LOOK like you're having a good time whilst at the goddamn concert! Fucking douchebags.
I am seriously thinking about taking a trip to another country to see TMV there instead of Sweden when they go onto another tour, I'm thinking about going to Polen because TMV said that they love the response they get on their shows in Polen, that there's something special. I just have to try out the theory that we Swedish people sucks as a TMV audience, this can't possibly be how people act to fuckass-awesome music from a fuckass-awesome band. I just can't take it. It would be cool to see a TMV show in America too sometime, that would be the one and only reason for me to travel to that country (I'm sorry America but you're goddamn scary most of the time).
/End rant on how swedish TMV-fans sucks.
It was a good setlist, I don't remember the whole list right now, but it was good. They jammed a lot (I don't really know how much in comparison to other shows, but they jammed however) and the most fabulous part of the show was in their jamming in the middle of Cicatriz ESP, Cedric just does his thing that only he can do, he's fantastic at improvising, and it all just escalates and escalates. It felt just as that fragment of a second before you get an orgasm, but then you take that fragment of a second and extend it into a minute instead, that's exactly how it felt. It was excruciatingly wonderful. They rocked Viscera Eyes really good and in this one I felt that the style of Dave Elitch fit in perfect with his heavy drumming (as to I am curious though, he seems so fast and light in the Youtube-videos, he must be nervous right now).
The thing that's sad at TMV concerts is that they never do an encore, and I don't know if they only diss that in shows when they are disheartened by the audience (Sweden!!), or if they just never do encores at all. I must do research in this matter.
And now follows some ranting about how much I adore Cedric, and that my friends I will take in Swedish because of the level of embarassement of it all at my age of 22.
Cedric var ju såklart helt fantastisk, han är truly teh sex på scen och varenda jävla del av hans kropp bara dansar hur han än gör. ARGH vad jag inte skulle protestera någonstans mot att föda hans barn! Nej nu ska jag lägga mig och drömma lite om hans fina händer och sexiga höfter.
Dröm sött!
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