Niedziela 17 Paź 2010, 22:33

Fri 15 Oct – The Wall Live
The performance was definitely impressive, as were the theatrics, but it may have been more energetic if the concert was a little less theatrical and a little more involved with the band. I've seen the mysteriously leaked professional footage of the original Pink Floyd performance of The Wall, and aside from the very effective and vivid projections onto the wall this time around, the show was almost the same. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but with it came its downfalls, mainly the fact that everybody except Roger himself was physically behind the wall and invisible for half of the concert. However, as I said, the projections were brilliant, and the wall was used as a giant screen. I especially liked the visuals that added thoughts to a few of the songs; for example, during Mother.

"Mother, should I trust the government?"
NO
FUCKING
WAY

Mother was probably the best-performed song of the show because of the amount of work put into the visual performance; phrases you'd expect to hear from mother scrolled by, and a large black-and-white projection of Roger playing the song from the original Wall concerts was used to great effect as well. I'll be uploading videos from the show sometime soon, since I basically bootlegged the entire thing.

Of course, when experiencing The Wall in any form in its entirety, every song is important and brilliant. In my opinion, most of the weaker tracks are on the second half of the album, and those tracks generally didn't have much theatrical activity. Mind you, the physical wall was completed a couple of tracks before Goodbye Cruel World. So there were several great songs (like Comfortably Numb) that simply involved Roger with his mic in front of this giant wall with amazing music coming from… well, who knows, right? It was a bit of a buzz killer. Thankfully, only two scenes were used from the movie (What Shall We Do Now? and The Trial). Any more would've been a bit of a cop-out.

It wasn't all projections, of course. There were small fireworks, giant props (teacher, flowers, airplane, evil flying pig), but a minimal amount of lights. Aside from that, Roger's vocals were about as strong as they were when he originally recorded The Wall in 1979. But it really was just The Wall live, and nothing else; there wasn't even any solo material at the end, especially not after the mess created by toppling a giant 'brick' wall all over the stage. But I guess he made his impression on the new generation, building up a giant wall and destroying it after promoting a strong anti-war message. Airplanes dropped Shell- and dollar sign-shaped bombs and victims of many wars were projected onto the wall during the intermission. A surprising amount of people were shitting their pants over the wall's collapse, I thought; but then again, I'd felt that it'd gotten old.

It's hard to complain about this legendary concert, but considering the cost of the tickets, I think I've earned it. 7/10