Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Concert Reviews - 2 for the price of none.

Recently I posted about my lucky streak winning concert tickets on Twitter (of all places). What I haven't done yet, is tell you about the concerts themselves, so here we go:

The first concert was on Thursday, January 7th at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston. SafetySuit and Parachute were the acts. To be honest, before this concert I'd barely heard of Parachute, and knew only one song by SafetySuit, this one:





Which I loved the minute I heard it.

By the way, this is Parachute:




So, the concert: SafetySuit came out first, and right away I was glad I had the opportunity to see them live before they blow up big. They are fantastic live, they put on a great show, full of energy and interaction with the audience. The lead singer has a great voice, and I really enjoyed their performance.

Parachute's music, I'll be honest, is not really my "style", but that being said, I thought they also put on a great show. They can certainly sing, their music is good, and there were definitely really great moments in their performance as well.

Overall, it was an enjoyable evening, and both bands made the free tickets a really nice "score"!

Moving onto the next concert. Last night I attended the Timbaland Shock Value II show at the House of Blues in Boston. This concert, I was REALLY looking forward to. I'm a big fan of Timbaland's work and couldn't wait to see what he would put together for his audience. After all, how can the man behind these hits:






And so many others, not put on a great show, right? Right...

Except...

Well, let me back up and start by talking about Honor Society, the opening act. I had never heard of them prior to the show, but let me tell you, a whole bunch of little "fan girls" sure did. They had quite the following at the show. In the event that you were as unschooled as I, this is Honor Society:



And as it were, they put on a great show. Nothing spectacular, but they engaged the audience, they were having the time of their life, and overall, it was a great show.

And thank goodness for that, because after that, it all pretty much went downhill.

Once the guys cleared the stage, Timbaland's "DJ" I guess you would call him, stepped on stage to prepare the audience for the main act. He proceeded to play old and new school hip hop, while he awkwardly talked over it asking people to Tweet him so he could give them shoutouts from the stage, and then just randomly reading people's Twitter names. Awkward.

Eventually, not after a short time, he introduced "Sebastian", Timbaland's brother (I guess) a rapper (I guess) who came out to perform (I guess). Sebastian did this awkward (there's that word again) performance where he mostly talked to the audience and a first for me basically, the first rapper I've ever seen lipsyincing, he sort of karaoke'd over his own tracks. And not well at that. At some point Petey Pablo came out on stage to perform one of his songs, and finally I was excited, thinking the show was about to start.

The excitement died down quickly when they all exited the stage and left mr. DJ doing his awkward Twitter roll call for another 20 minutes or so. The show "started" at 8, finally at about 9:45 or so Timbaland hit the stage.

Although, HIT might be too strong a word. More like moseyed on in. Sat down at his equipment and sort of "mumbled" "Okay, I'm going to lay some beats down for you guys". Anyway, I figured he was just warming up. Soon enough, it appeared all the waiting had paid off when he launched into "Timothy Where Have You Been" one of the songs from his new cd. The performance was great, high energy, with an extensive light and video show. Timbaland hits the stage with a FULL band, and this honestly led to the belief that this was a show with great potential.

Unfortunately, what it turned out to be was a show full of starts and stops. After that first song, he launched into an extensive babbling conversation with the audience. After that, a few more songs, again, great showing, great potential. And then...well, then he completely lost me.

For about 25 minutes he launched into an exchange with the audience. No, let me be more specific, with particular female members of the audience. He proceeded, in the next 25 minutes, to ask specific ladies in the audience their names and age. Suddenly we were transported to Timbaland's Private/Very Public Dating Game. After an excrutiating 25 minutes of "who will Timbaland hook up with backstage tonight", he simply walked off the stage, quickly followed by his band members, leaving his "dj" to play more hip hop and shout out Twitter roll call.

No inclination as to whether or not he'd be back. no "i'll be back, I'm taking a break" he just simply walked off. Mind you that at this point it was barely 10:30 PM...considering we, the audience, had been standing (no chairs at a club show) since 7pm, he certainly did NOT need a break that badly, you think? also, a quick note, after he exited the stage, we saw him peak back around the corner with another guy and point out one of the girls in the audience...

So, for the next 30 minutes, while we waited in the audience to find out whether or not the show would continue, he was probably having a good old time backstage with said girl...or not, we'll never know, will we?

We left at that point. We'd had enough of this completely disorganized, disappointing and self-indulgent show.

Thankfully, the tickets were free.

3 comments:

WhiteBullie said...

Sorry to hear that, does this mean you would not pay to see him live again?

PBNJM said...

that sucks. I feel bad for the people who paid to see him, except maybe for the girl who scored...

SwissMs99 said...

Holy moly - that is an awful show...and very awkward! Wow, I am so glad that you won those tix and didn't pay a dime! Eek!