[kj] (OT) The Cult Live in SoCal

[T.B.]

Caught The Cult Friday night in Anaheim at The Grove.  This is about the 
10th or 11th time I've seen them since '85 during the "Love" tour.  I've 
pretty much lost track how many times I've seen them.

Really solid show, maybe a bit better overall than the last show I caught 
which was last year's show in Los Angeles.  The venue holds around 1,900 
people and it kind of reminds me of a small aircraft hanger that's been 
built up to a theater club.  The place is on the corner of the parking lot 
for the Anaheim Stadium which happened to have the huge Christian Harvest 
Festival going on tonight which Ian joked about a couple times during the 
show ("They're having a religious show, we're having a pagan show").  It was 
pretty cool running into people who I recognized and who recognized me from 
previous Cult shows going back to the '02 "Farewell" shows at The Wiltern 
and last years show in LA.

The audience was very well behaved, in fact perhaps a bit too well behaved, 
almost sedate at times even though it was standing general admission.  In 
past shows with a less than responsive audience, I've seen Ian and even 
Billy get a bit pissed off but they seemed to focus on delivering a top 
notch performance and didn't try to aggressively rile up the audience.  The 
sound was decent depending on where you were.  I spent the first half of the 
show about 3 people back from the stage in the pit and Billy's guitar was 
nice, up front and loud but Ian's vocals were tough to make out.  I moved 
about halfway back during "Revolution" and Ian's vocals were much more 
prominent in the mix.

"Horse Nation" opened the show and the first 4 songs through "Electric 
Ocean" just rocked. In fact, Electric Ocean along with a truly inspired 
version of The Phoenix complete with acid-flashback guitar intro were 
probably the highlights for me. It was also nice to get Spiritwalker" and 
"Nirvana" early in that group of songs. New songs "Dirty Little Rock Star" 
and "I Assassin" sounded much more powerful than any of the various YouTube 
clips I've seen thus far.  The sorta acoustic version of "Revolution" is 
excellent with Ian ad-libbing a lot of lyrics. Also nice was the one-two 
punch of "In The Clouds" and "The Witch," which incidentally had the best 
bass sound of any live version I've ever heard. This is probably the first 
show I've seen since '87 that they didn't include "Li'l Devil" in the set, 
which I honestly didn't mind losing (they played it Saturday night in Del 
Mar and thankfully dropped "Wonderland" which has become stale).

And of course, no Cult concert review would be complete without the Billy 
report.  As anyone who's remotely familiar with The Cult knows, guitarist 
Billy Duffy is probably one of the more tempremental players onstage and 
seems to suffer more technical difficulties than anyone I've ever seen.  I'm 
happy to say he appeared to have a pretty good night as far as equipment 
issues, the worst problems he seemed to have was occasionally strongly 
gesturing at his side stage monitor guy to raise his wedge monitor levels a 
few times while he was playing.  He looked pretty pleased with himself and 
the way the show unfolded.

Overall, The Cult has always been one of the most reliable and consistantly 
good bands I've seen. In over 2 decades worth of shows, I've yet to catch a 
bad one.  BTW, someone already posted a live clip on YouTube from last 
night. Here's "Rain."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b51IFq5Eh0g

The setlist:

Horse Nation
Nirvana
Spiritwalker
Electric Ocean
Fire Woman
In The Clouds
The Witch
Wonderland
Revolution (acoustic with Mike)
Edie (full band)
Rain
I Assassin (new song)
Phoenix (great extended guitar solo opening)
Rise
Wildflower
Love Removal Machine
   Encore:
Dirty Little Rockstar (new song)
Sanctuary

T.B.