Review: Radiohead @ Comcast Center

Radiohead @ Comcast Center, Mansfield, MA -- May 29, 2012
Review: Dave Bolton

Everything is in its right place, Thom dances in Mansfield.

It says a lot about the Comcast Center in Mansfield that it has a regular schedule of bands that are happy to play there. Most of them get a bit confused about where exactly in Massachusetts it is. I have seen several experienced performers refer to it as Boston on stage but this tree-lined venue is not (and I emphasize NOT) anywhere near Beantown.

The former Great Woods/Tweeter Center is 30 miles away from the center of Boston and can only be accessed through a series of Interstate connections and a Main Street that doubles as paid parking in the yards of local residents for those of us sensible enough to not want to leave our car in the free parking on-site.

The reason some of us pay to park when it is free at the venue? Because Comcast has a capacity of 19,000 and the average time to get out of the car-park after a gig is finished is anywhere between 15 and 120 minutes…which is just one of the problems with attending a concert on a school night. But when it’s Radiohead, it will probably be worth it.

I left Boston at 7 p.m. to travel the 30 miles to the venue by car and traffic was anything but a joy. There is no public transport to the venue, the nearest train station is somewhere in Mansfield, but I have been to many gigs at Comcast and am yet to meet anybody who has relied on commuter rail to get there.

This is a just a long way of saying that I missed the support band – Caribou - and that I heard the first Radiohead song through the trees as I walked to the venue from $15 parking spot on the grass outside somebody’s house. Which wasn’t a major problem; there are worse things than hearing "Bloom" float towards me through the air on a muggy Massachusetts night.

Review: Rammstein @ DCU Center

Rammstein @ DCU Center, Worchester, MA -- April 29, 2012
Review: Dave Bolton

When you live in Massachusetts and are a music fan, you get to expect certain things. The most obvious one is that everyone knows that Aerosmith come from this area and it doesn’t matter that they are no longer relevant.

The second aspect of living here is that in terms of mid-size venues…we’re a bit limited. If you are a touring band with an impressive stage-show and you want to play Boston, you play the TD Garden. If you are a popular band that will get the punters in, you play the House of Blues and if you aren’t confident of selling that many tickets but you know that people have heard your music on the radio, you play the Paradise/Royale/Brighton Music Hall.

If you are a industrial metal band from Germany performing a live set that relies on explosions, pyrotechnics, flamethrowers and penis-shaped cannons dispensing “foam” onto the audience, you need to find somewhere that isn’t in Boston.

Which explains why I was in Worcester on a Sunday night (less than 24 hours before I had to be on a plane to England) to experience Rammstein effortlessly battering all of my senses into submission.

Review: The Wombats, Static Jacks, & Flagship @ The Middle East

The Wombats, Static Jacks, & Flagship @ The Middle East, Boston, MA - April 24, 2012
Review: Dave Bolton

So here we are again, it’s another “popular” band from the UK playing in a venue that seems slightly small. If I was confused by the sight of Kasabian failing to sell out the House of Blues in Boston, I am slightly baffled by The Wombats playing in front of 575 people in Cambridge.

To be fair, the show was sold out. It’s just the venue is very small. Put it this way, there wasn’t a lot of room to move about once the headline band came on. If you wanted to see a quirky band from Liverpool surrounded by drunk students and the indie fashionistas that frequent Cambridge MA, then The Middle East was the place to be.

There is no doubt that The Wombats are quirky. They have songs that talk about drinking champagne with Schumacher (I presume Michael, it could be Ralf but they are soccer fans so it might even be Harold/Toni) or dancing to Joy Division. They are a three-piece band that bound on stage with energy and play their brand of indietronica with nothing less than total competency.

They got the crowd moving, they engaged in banter and they played some half-decent songs. I didn’t dislike what they were doing, I tapped my feet in all the right places and I even sang along to "Kill The Director," agreeing wholeheartedly that this is no Bridget Jones.

But like so many things in my musical life, I found myself asking one question; would John Peel have played them on his radio show?

Review: Kasabian @ House Of Blues

Kasabian @ House Of Blues, Boston, MA - March 27, 2012
Review: Dave Bolton

It must be really odd for some British bands when they come to tour the USA. In the Mother Country, they are genuine superstars playing huge venues and filling the headline festival spot on a regular basis. Band members appear on TV, get to drive cars around the Top Gear test-track and get photographed falling drunk out of numerous Awards Ceremonies while clutching golden proof of their popularity.
Every now and again, these bands talk about “breaking America”. They want to follow in the footsteps of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Coldplay and Susan Boyle [Hahahaha - Ed.]. They announce a series of dates, tickets are eagerly snapped up by the ex-pats who have actually heard of them and then they perform in front of a small crowd in mid-size venues.

On Tuesday night in Boston, Kasabian continued with their latest attempt to get America interested in their rock/dance hybrid that has seen them replace Oasis as the band that “lads” like to listen to. The predictable break-up of Noel Gallagher’s backing band left a void in the hearts of some music fans in the UK, a space that Kasabian have more than filled since their first LP was released in 2004.

Review: The Wedding Present @ Brighton Music Hall

The Wedding Present @Brighton Music Hall, Boston, MA - March 23, 2012
Review: Dave Bolton

What once was an interesting trend has become a full-blown epidemic. I can’t even remember who started it, but it seems that what some bands like to do now is treat the fans who actually like to listen to LPs by track order rather than using shuffle or just the radio-friendly unit shifters to live renditions of selected albums. Not just tracks, entire albums.

In the last three years I have seen The Cult play the whole of Love from start to finish, Peter Hook ignoring the wishes of New Order to play Unknown Pleasures, Slayer encoring with the 27 minutes of Reign in Blood and Marillion (UK prog-rock legends, hitting the USA in June) using their bi-annual conventions in Europe to play entire LP’s in the order of release.

On Friday, it was the turn of another legendary band to gallop in a chronological manner.
The Wedding Present may only have one founding member in the form of David Gedge but the darlings of the mid 80-late 90’s UK indie-rock scene (and a personal favorite of the late John Peel) are using their 2012 tour to play 1991’s Seamonsters in all it’s layers of quiet-loud-not quiet-loud again glory.

Review: Van Halen @ TD Banknorth Garden

Van Halen, TD Banknorth Garden, Boston, MA - March 11, 2012
Review: Dave Bolton

A Different Kind of Truth; It Was Always Van Halen, Not Van Hagar

From the moment that the house lights went down and the opening riff from “Unchained” blasted out of the white speaker stacks, Van Halen hit the ground running.

The full-time return of Diamond Dave Lee Roth to the band that made him a household name in the late 1970’s and which propelled him into a patchy solo career after 1984 was a moment that many of us Van Halen fans believed that we would never see again. Even better was the news that there was to be a new LP and the first new recordings with DLR for 27 years.

A Different Kind of Truth was released in February and, to be fair, it is a Van Halen album. Gone are the numerous arena rock ballads that epitomized the Van Hagar version of the band and in their place are a set of catchy tunes that wouldn’t be out of place on the first incarnation of the Halen. Which is understandable as most of them are apparently old demos that had been sitting in Eddie’s cupboard since Diamond Dave decided that he was better off without the brothers backing him up.

That was then this is now. Not so much a best of both worlds but an erasing of Sammy Hagar and Gary Cherone from the set-list. This was a Van Halen gig, a family affair and one where the only non-VH was Diamond Dave himself after Wolfgang VH was drafted in to replace Michael Anthony on bass duties.
But on a Sunday night in front of an enthusiastic (and probably inebriated) Boston audience, the showman took to his tiny wooden dance floor and shuffled his shoes just enough to ensure that we all remembered why we fell in love with this rock band.