(with Ghostigital)
Saturday, May 12, 2007 8:00pm
Auditorium Theater
Chicago, IL
Ghostigital (opening act): Picture a guy (who apparently used to be in The Sugarcubes) working out some issues by shout-singing a litany of unintelligible pronouncements while another guy at a laptop cranks out blistering electro-thrash. Yikes. I'll be at the bar...
Bjork's outfit: Oversized gold lamé potato sack inscribed with a topographic map of Mt. McKinley. Black spandex with day-glo fuzzy caterpillars glued to them. Barefoot.
The band: A drummer. Two guys on electronics and/or keyboards. Ten-piece all-female brass section with flags sticking up over their heads wearing flowing pastel robes.
The audience: 99.8% Caucasian.
The stage: Colorful banners with pictures of fish (I think) on them hung from above. Occasional pyrotechnic flame bursts and green laser beams. Big screen TVs showing the fingers of the electronics guys pressing buttons and lights and stuff.
(Is it just me, or does all this vaguely nationalistic imagery and the brass brigade combined with the fist-pumping sell-out crowd's perpetual standing ovation look a lot like those fascist rally-esque concert scenes in Pink Floyd: The Wall...?)
if (preg_match('/"Because I'd done two or three projects in a row that were quite serious, maybe I just needed to get that out of my system or something. So all I wanted to do for this album was just to have fun and do something that was full-bodied and really up. ... Everything that stay[ed] was a little nostalgic, going back to 1992 when you had really simple 808 and 909 really lo-fi drum machines not doing anything fancy but really basic — almost like rave or trance stuff..."
The beats were big, the bass was phat, the amps were set to eleven. That Icelandic brass section provided mostly visual interest, with the electronics, percussion, and Bjork's vocals competing for dominance in the mix.
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