Some Bands Are Best Live
Band-Maid 2023 North American Tour: Postscript
I was born too late to have seen the Beatles live, but I remember the media coverage of the hordes of screaming girls. I thought the Beatles were great, but I found all the fan hysteria quite ridiculous.
As I got older, I read press about people who followed other rock bands around from city to city, sort of how some sports fans follow their favorite teams. I knew one guy who managed to see 37 consecutive Grateful Dead concerts (ok, Deadheads are more than a bit weird).
There are obviously a lot of bands or solo artists with huge fanbases. There are far fewer whose fans will pick up and follow them to multiple gigs. Thinking about what makes the difference, I realized it is simply being a great live band. That is not trivial — very few artists are as good live as they are in the studio. The Beatles are perhaps the most iconic example — they actually quit touring only five years into their run and were solely a studio band after 1966.
Huge pop stars like Madonna and Beyonce can afford massive productions that obscure the little inaccuracies or rough spots that are a natural part of live performing. Does that make them truly great live performers? It depends on what your expectations are. Now, we live in the era of autotune. Many singers lip-synch — we used to have scandals over that.
Most artists are more exposed— even big, loud bands like AC/DC or Iron Maiden. They may use some backing tracks and small effects, but they are largely there to play their instruments and sing. Their fans are not expecting perfection — if they were, they would be disappointed. The fans are there to soak in the experience of seeing their favorite band live.
But there are the rare acts that elevate their game when they perform live. I never cared for the Dead, but it is clear that the Dead live were much more representative of how they (and their fans) imagined themselves than any studio album was. While they’re not my cup of tea — I’m too OCD to put up with that much sloppiness — I understand why their fans felt they had to see them live.
Band-Maid are quite simply a phenomenal live band. It’s a combination of energy, raw capability, charisma, and their ability to improvise that make their live shows so compelling. As a result, we have professional musicians and hardened metalheads crisscrossing the country to catch multiple concerts, obsessively recording each set and trying to cover them in their home studios afterward.
The band’s motto is “World Domination”. They manage to act like they have no idea how crazy that ambition is. And now, within the world of rock music, it’s starting to seem not so out of reach. Even Rolling Stone has taken notice — and they are about as sclerotic and slow-on-the-uptake as a music journal can be. Here is their mini-review of Band-Maid’s appearance at Lollapalooza earlier this month:
Here is a clip that captures the moment described by Rolling Stone. It’s the song “Hate?” from their 2022 EP “Unleash.” Unlike some of the other songs on the EP, it is a fairly traditional “four on the floor” rocker with a couple of twists — it was actually written some time earlier than the rest of “Unleash” and then shelved for a couple of years.
They added an instrumental bridge featuring the lead guitar and the bass for their live tour, doing a call-and-response. In the previous post, I included my cell phone capture of the duet (duel?) from the August 14 concert. Here, we have the full song, with professional sound mixing and an extended version of the duel.
The audio track is straight from Lollapalooza, but the video component was actually spliced together from Lollapalooza and some of their other performances on the tour. For people who love old-school, virtuoso hard rock, it’s as incendiary as any performance I’ve seen or heard in 40 years.
This tour was unquestionably a breakthrough for Band-Maid. After their 2022 tour sold out in 48 hours, they added ten dates to their 2023 tour, which was then in the planning phase. This tour, likewise, sold out quickly. They are bringing in fans from all walks of life and musical tastes. But Band-Maid are also at a crossroads. They will have to make some decisions about musical direction.
As they have grown, they have been writing more and more ambitious music. Their most recent work is complex, layered, often chaotic, even dissonant — and on the face of it, less commercial. It is the reverse of the usual trajectory, in which rock bands with an edgy sound “sell out” and make softer, more formulaic music to appeal to larger audiences.
They started off performing music written for them by studio songwriters. It was lighter and poppier than what they wanted to do, and in the end, it didn’t break through for them. After they went to writing all of their own material, they really began to blow up. So moving in the direction of harder, more complex music has worked for them so far. But recently, some fans of their earlier work have said the new stuff is too much for them, perhaps too academic.
Here is one of their recent songs from their last album. Guitarists and music nerds love this and have been analyzing it to death, but is it “radio-friendly”? As usual with Band-Maid, it has more groove when they perform this live, but it’s still pretty intense.
“Sense”
What do you think? Should they keep pushing the envelope? What is your favorite period in their discography? My take: This is a good problem to have!
Band Maid are a rare breed of Band who make every performance and every recording different and worth listening to on their own merits. The joy of a Band that has been going ten years is that they have to evolve and grow musically. Some fans may prefer one style to another. But for me every song is a pure delight. Thanks for the review and may the band continue producing great music.