Home

Attended Stellastarr* at the Shelter. It was a somewhat weak performance as feared as lead-singer-with-weird-voice-guy (that I'm too lazy to look up) was unable to maintain the odd 80s british thing over the cacophony of the rest of the band. Having never been to the Shelter before, I was blown away by their sound system. Not impressed, just actually knocked over by how loud it was. How loud was it? When I put in my earplugs (isn't it pathetic that earplugs are SOP to attend a concert?), I thought I had inserted them incorrectly, as I was getting no reduction in noise. After experimenting, I realized that they were in properly, it was just that the sound was so great that it penetrated my flesh and skull, liquifying my brain to turn it into a perfect amplifier and deliver yet more volume to my ears. I literally had to keep my mouth closed so that the sound waves wouldn't somehow echo in the back of my throat and cause my ears to run screaming from my body. (And yes, I did use literally correctly. It's just the second half of the sentence that is ridiculous. The first part is true. When I opened my mouth, the music got louder.) In addition, the sickness that struck during the Darkness concert struck again, leading me to the stunning conclusion that maybe the mushroom burger at Bo's Brewery was not contaminated, and instead my stomach for some godforsaken reason doesn't like being vibrated by insanely loud bass notes for periods of longer than an hour. Now I am all for loud music. I love feeling bass notes, but when my internal organs (not known for their keen hearing) say uncle, maybe it's time to turn it down a little. The problem is that the people running the boards at the shows have all been deafened by years of attending way too loud shows. Four hours later, my ears are ringing and I WAS WEARING EARPLUGS!!!!!! Is it possible to set the general volume of concerts around that of movies? Action movies are plenty loud, and I don't hear many complaints of movies being too quiet (probably because recent concerts have reduced my ear drums to sobbing piles of ooze). That way, maybe I'D ACTUALLY GET TO LISTEN TO THE MUSIC!!! Stellastarr* really suffered from the backup vocals being unable to hear that they were way out of tune. Especially the guitarist on the left. Wow. The reason CDs sound good is that the songs are balanced, and every instrument is given the opportunity to be heard. Concerts are cool because you can hear variations of a song that reflect the musician's talent. Recently, concerts have just been struggles to figure out what song they're playing because it all comes out as one really loud fart. The Killers opened for Stellastarr* and were awesome, but it would have been nice to understand more than just the words "soul" and "soldier" for the entire night. I'm so old. P.S. I'm hoping that the open-air venue of Coachella will allow most of the loudness to dissipate, but that effect will likely be lost when everyone else wants to "move up".