Smile Like You Mean It - It's The Killers in Atlanta!
First and foremost: if you're here from the Music Monday hops, hello! My selection is at the bottom, but I hope you'll stay for the review of the show as well :)
Thursday evening (August 15, 2013), I headed to Atlanta for The Killers show with Spank. The evening was perfect for me, but poor Spank was sick and achy. And being the trooper she is, she came out to enjoy the show with me anyway! (and you can (and should) read her review here.)
After some shenanigans where we very nearly started out for the wrong venue and a bit of tailgating, we headed inside the arena, grabbed some merch, and headed to our seats way back in the back of the venue. It's really frustrating to have pit "seat" tastes on a lawn seat budget, but those are the breaks sometimes (and we weren't on the lawn, but the same principle applies to anything farther back than the first few rows!) We found our seats just in time to see the last song or two by special guests The Virgins, who were perfect to get the crowd ready for the night's headliner.
Proudly hailing from fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, Brandon Flowers, Dave Keuning, Mark Stoermer and Ronnie Vannucci, Jr (along with Ted Sablay and Jake Blanton) quickly cranked the heat up on this unseasonably cool, Mid-August night in Georgia with the crowd-pleasing opener "Mr. Brightside." The band continued with "Spaceman" and "The Way It Was" before Brandon decided to "test" our "Hot Fuss knowledge" with "Smile Like You Mean It." The show, laden with lasers, pyro, a beautiful fireworks waterfall, and tons and tons of confetti in the shapes of lightening bolts and the letter "k", stretched for what seemed like a good two hours in which we also got a bit of verse from "Human" before launching into "Bling (Confession of a King)" and a cover of Joy Division's "Shadowplay."
Then? Then they played my favorite song off Battle Born (and quite possibly my favorite song of theirs, period.), "Miss Atomic Bomb," "Human" and "Somebody Told Me" before nearly making me cry with "Be Still." Continuing with "For Reasons Unknown," "From Here on Out," "A Dustland Fairytale," "Read My Mind" and "Runaways," they closed the main part of their set out with "All These Things That I've Done."
For their encore, they brought Xan and Donald from The Virgins out for a beautiful rendition of Neil Young's "Albuquerque," which also nearly made me cry. They then performed "Jenny Was a Friend of Mine" before going into an epic, seven-plus minute version of "Battle Born" during which lead singer Flowers introduced his band, jumped into the crowd and talked about new sensations in unmentionable body parts (tsk, tsk. You naughty, naughty Mormon boy!). They finished their performance for the evening with "When You Were Young," the latter two songs (and talk of unmentionable body parts) you can see here on this youtube vid (that some kind soul recorded, uploaded, and left sharing enabled):
What can I possibly say about this band, this show, to do the night justice? Not much. Technically speaking, they are perfect. From my vantage point (the back of the arena, so I did most of my watching on the Jumbo-tron) the band members were each so into what they were doing that there wasn't a lot of fan interaction or other theatrics. That sounds like a bad thing, but it's really not - I actually kind of love it when someone is so focused on what they're doing that they're just lost in it. In fact, *I* was just lost in it all as well. I don't think I stopped swaying the entire evening. Being able to move and around and lose yourself is one of the advantages, I suppose, to being in a less crowded section of the venue.
The band may not have commanded the crowd, but they certainly managed to shine on their own and mesmerize us all the same. Dominating the audience was the ever-charismatic Brandon Flowers, who smiled all night long, is very comfortable in his lead singer role, and also appeared to be genuinely happy to be up there performing. With his vocal abilities, why wouldn't he be? The man's got an amazing voice that sounds exactly the same live as it does produced and recorded. He hits every note, gets every pitch spot-on. Even the higher notes sound the same. He was clearly born to do this.
This was an unbelievably amazing night. At one point, I turned to Spank and said "Can you even believe this?" We were both just in awe of how good The Killers are live. If you like their music, then you NEED to see them live. I know I will again, any time I have the opportunity.
Image Credit: Brandon Flowers courtesy of Elizabeth Flores
Thursday evening (August 15, 2013), I headed to Atlanta for The Killers show with Spank. The evening was perfect for me, but poor Spank was sick and achy. And being the trooper she is, she came out to enjoy the show with me anyway! (and you can (and should) read her review here.)
After some shenanigans where we very nearly started out for the wrong venue and a bit of tailgating, we headed inside the arena, grabbed some merch, and headed to our seats way back in the back of the venue. It's really frustrating to have pit "seat" tastes on a lawn seat budget, but those are the breaks sometimes (and we weren't on the lawn, but the same principle applies to anything farther back than the first few rows!) We found our seats just in time to see the last song or two by special guests The Virgins, who were perfect to get the crowd ready for the night's headliner.
Proudly hailing from fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, Brandon Flowers, Dave Keuning, Mark Stoermer and Ronnie Vannucci, Jr (along with Ted Sablay and Jake Blanton) quickly cranked the heat up on this unseasonably cool, Mid-August night in Georgia with the crowd-pleasing opener "Mr. Brightside." The band continued with "Spaceman" and "The Way It Was" before Brandon decided to "test" our "Hot Fuss knowledge" with "Smile Like You Mean It." The show, laden with lasers, pyro, a beautiful fireworks waterfall, and tons and tons of confetti in the shapes of lightening bolts and the letter "k", stretched for what seemed like a good two hours in which we also got a bit of verse from "Human" before launching into "Bling (Confession of a King)" and a cover of Joy Division's "Shadowplay."
For their encore, they brought Xan and Donald from The Virgins out for a beautiful rendition of Neil Young's "Albuquerque," which also nearly made me cry. They then performed "Jenny Was a Friend of Mine" before going into an epic, seven-plus minute version of "Battle Born" during which lead singer Flowers introduced his band, jumped into the crowd and talked about new sensations in unmentionable body parts (tsk, tsk. You naughty, naughty Mormon boy!). They finished their performance for the evening with "When You Were Young," the latter two songs (and talk of unmentionable body parts) you can see here on this youtube vid (that some kind soul recorded, uploaded, and left sharing enabled):
What can I possibly say about this band, this show, to do the night justice? Not much. Technically speaking, they are perfect. From my vantage point (the back of the arena, so I did most of my watching on the Jumbo-tron) the band members were each so into what they were doing that there wasn't a lot of fan interaction or other theatrics. That sounds like a bad thing, but it's really not - I actually kind of love it when someone is so focused on what they're doing that they're just lost in it. In fact, *I* was just lost in it all as well. I don't think I stopped swaying the entire evening. Being able to move and around and lose yourself is one of the advantages, I suppose, to being in a less crowded section of the venue.
The band may not have commanded the crowd, but they certainly managed to shine on their own and mesmerize us all the same. Dominating the audience was the ever-charismatic Brandon Flowers, who smiled all night long, is very comfortable in his lead singer role, and also appeared to be genuinely happy to be up there performing. With his vocal abilities, why wouldn't he be? The man's got an amazing voice that sounds exactly the same live as it does produced and recorded. He hits every note, gets every pitch spot-on. Even the higher notes sound the same. He was clearly born to do this.
This was an unbelievably amazing night. At one point, I turned to Spank and said "Can you even believe this?" We were both just in awe of how good The Killers are live. If you like their music, then you NEED to see them live. I know I will again, any time I have the opportunity.
Image Credit: Brandon Flowers courtesy of Elizabeth Flores
5 comments:
I love the killers! It's so awesome you got to see them!
New-to-me band. Thanks for sharing and dancing with the 4M crew on Monday's Music Moves Me!
I *heart* The Killers! Lucky!!!! :D I know y'all had fun!
Linking from MM,
Ricki Jill
how wonderful for you so happy you got to see them
Thanks so much for stopping by, everyone! I was so happy to be able to see them; they were amazing!
Post a Comment