Yeah, Bsp--both Grant Park and Alpine Valley were towering shows. Hearing "True Love Waits" IN CHICAGO IN GRANT PARK NEXT TO THE LAKE WATCHING THE SKYLINE was sooooo unspeakably perfect. At that point, I think it was just the fourth time they'd ever played it. Oh, my god....so wonderful. Got to hear "Lurgee," too! Wasn't that cool? And didn't they break out "Permanent Daylight?" God damn, what a show....
Again, though--that Alpine performance was "religiousness and religiosity made whole."
Oh, and Lazarus is definitely right about
Passengers being both more avant-garde than
Kid A and in that it pre-dates the same album by QUITE a lot of time. Nearly daily, I am upset that when I go to all my indie shows and shop at all my indie shops that I have to pretend I didn't drive 200 miles to see U2 twice, last week. Even if I mention the album, nobody knows what the fuck I'm talking about (though that's U2's fault, not theirs--they could easily have gotten the balls of Bowie, Byrne, Radiohead, etc. and just released the album under their own name)...and when I describe it, I'm usually not believed.
I guess that part of the problem really is publicity; though Radiohead didn't do no interviews, they fuckin' released the album as themselves and all that stuff. I love how different and gutsy
Passengers is, but I'm sure I can't be the only one who's unnerved by the bands whole we-didn't-actually-do-that-album attitude upon its release (particularly in their neo-Holy Land of America).
Shady.
As.
Hell.
...And then [/I]POP[/I] came out and was great not because it was all out-there and left-field and whack (as the band insisted it would be, time and again)...it was NOT a techno record or a dance record or fuckin' anything like that. It was a slightly new version of U2 with a couple of really interesting off-shoots here and there and some really interested contemporary ideas affixed to the pre-established stylistic framework already established by the band. I dug it because of that. It was U2 not being U2 and, in the end, being nothing but U2.
Sorry. I ramble. In case you can't tell, I'm sort of in thesis-mode, these days...