Hmm, I’m trying to figure out how I can post from my cell phone. You see, I’ve got some cool videos that I want to upload. Videos taken while we sat in the fourth row for this. It’s a tad odd, but I’ve now seen Duran Duran live 3 times – including these awesome seats and a special club appearance when they first reunited.
I have to admit that I really dig a lot of the new album – there was some great dance music. And the band still knows how to put on a great show. After they played the new album (Red Carpet Massacre) in it’s entirety, there was a brief intermission before they kicked into the second and third acts. The second act was called the Electro Set and it felt as though they were channeling Kraftwerk. The third act was when they really kicked in with the classics, including an awesome rendition of “The Reflex”.
Although the tickets were way more than I wanted to spend on a concert (apparently The Woman agreed to go before finding out just how ridiculous the prices were), we still had a blast. Hopefully I’ll figure out how to post the videos from my phone to avoid this being just a really lame review…
Perhaps it comes across better live, when they don’t have Timbaland and Justin Timberlake sucking the joy out of every song they’re in, but I intensely dislike most of the new album. There are a few decent ones, but all the collaborative songs are just terrible beyond belief.
I haven’t heard the actual recorded versions of any of the songs, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the production kills the great feeling from the live versions. My personal favorites were the opening track and the instrumental.
I’ll put it this way, I don’t remember anything off of Astronaut, but a number of these new songs got me dancing.
See, I adore Astronaut and listen to it regularly (last.fm shows that I did two days ago) but most of the new songs make me want to throw things violently across the room, most noteably Night Runner – which I would prefer to never hear again – and Skin Divers – which has incredible promise until Timbaland starts rapping and turns it into one of the worst abominations of songs I’ve heard. It’s infuriating how good some of the songs could be, and how they get destroyed by the collaborators.
Plus, it’s nearly impossible to pick John Taylor out of the mix, and his basslines have always been a noteable and important part of DD songs.
Yeah, the rap part was pretty lame in that song. But it was very low key live (since he wasn’t actually there). Also, they really mix the bass up during their shows. But that’s a complaint I have with a lot of music these days. I love the bass, but everybody wants it mixed down on their CDs even though it almost always makes bands sound better live.
That even happened with the local bands in Hoboken. Eugene’s bassist had his own cheering section, and the lines he played were ridiculously awesome. But whenever they put a CD together you could barely hear him. It’s frustrating how much bad production can screw up quality material. I’ll eventually have to buy the CD for Lisa, but I’m worried that I won’t enjoy it compared to the show…
You should listen to more Rush 😉
And we recorded when Sirius previewed the album last week and it was just… painful. There were about 4 songs that I will probably buy with free iTunes credits but most of it was weird and not very good. A lot of the problem is that the stuff that is “new” for DD is very old school derivative house/rap/dance. There’s this vague haze of that icky goofy cover of White Lines that they did.
“Look, mommy! Old men saying wiggy wiggy wiggy!”
Nite (ugh) Runner is a Timberlake song as covered by DD. Falling Down is a lesser, derivative Come Undone (and Ordinary World, and Whatever Happens Tomorrow, etc.) with some frightening boy bandish harmonies.
The only ones that I disctintly remember enjoying were Box Full of Honey and She’s Too Much. Lots of them fell into that meh category which was really disappointing to me, after loving Astronaut so much. Oh well 😛