Hey everyone, welcome to issue #70 of Crow’s Nest. Unfortunately I’ve been feeling a bit more tired than usual since returning from Vegas, as though I didn’t get 3,500+ words for this issue down, so I’m slightly late on it. So it goes. Let’s get into it.
As someone who, if you haven’t picked up on this before, is a bit of a live music enthusiast, I don’t actually have a lot of interest in traveling for individual concerts. Festivals, yes, of course, those I will travel for to a somewhat embarrassing degree relative to my other vacationing. (Anyone wanna join me in Philly in September?) But when I hear of people traveling for individual shows, I find that peculiar. Like yes, I get seeing your favorite artist at Red Rocks, or planning a trip around said show or seeing what’s in town when you’re there. But I’ve never thought about making it a point to see a show at somewhere like the Ryman, or checked out just-announced tour dates and gone ‘Dang, X at Y? Maybe I should go see them there!’ Disappointment at skipping Chicago when an artist passes nearby is about the extent of my feelings there. Architecture and other layout quirks aside, I assume most non-DIY spaces have a decent sound system and, provided the sound guy is also decent, the experience will be, at minimum, fine, even if the other experiential aspects of the show aren’t. Perhaps it’s the sheer volume of shows I go to, but an individual show somewhere is nothing to get too excited about.
Given the above, you can imagine how I might’ve (not) felt about the Sphere when it was announced last year, with U2 opening the Las Vegas venue with a residency. (Its name is technically ‘sphere at the Venetian Resort’; for clarity and in the tradition of Ohio State University I will refer to it as the Sphere.) I think anything I skimmed about it left my brain with minimal retention. Vegas has never really appealed to me: my interest in gambling is mostly limited to playing in my brother’s semi-regular poker game; none of the entertainment seems up my alley; the city’s reputation as an oasis of sin and vice and capitalistic glory is largely unappealing to me, someone on the political left who has drugs at home; and environmentally, while the city’s water conservation is undoubtedly world-class, situating a major city in a desert where it’s 100º every day and you’ll probably melt if you stay outside your air-conditioned cocoon for too long is a disaster waiting to happen. An exciting food scene? Many people here in Chicago loathe The Bear for its limited perspective on what we have to offer. I don’t have anything new to add about Vegas, you get the point. Not for me, and not anything I will choose to actively seek out. Color me unimpressed.
But once the U2 shows at the Sphere started, hype unexpectedly built up, and it wasn’t an astroturf job. Something about these U2 shows resonated with people, and were described as something approaching a religious revelation. They were so big, so overwhelming. The big screens on the outside of the Sphere did meme-worthy shit. All of this for U2, a band that hasn’t made a song worth remembering in 2 decades and is little more than the butt of a joke if you’re not a fan. They certainly have fans as they’re still a fixture on stadium show bills, and Bono’s outside activities generate media interest, but they’re just not an exciting group. But that hype did make it seem like something you had to see for yourself. Again, I wasn’t going to head out there for just anyone, but if the right opportunity presented itself …
Enter Dead and Company, the John Mayer-led, most prominent Grateful Dead successor act around, including original guitarist Bob Weir and drummer Mickey Hart. The group seemingly pretty definitively called last year’s shows their final tour, but found an entertainment complex-sized loophole in the Sphere and announced a multi-weekend run of shows, stating ‘It’s a residency, not a tour’. Which, you know, fine. As someone who can probably wind up my Deadhead parents about the additional Fare Thee Well shows last decade, this is not the first and probably won’t be the last time the Dead family betrays its integrity for additional shows. Even if you’re not lining up for tickets, you’re lying if you say you aren’t interested in them. My mom and brother were also interested, and we soon had tickets, flights and a hotel lined up for a full weekend of shows.
The Sphere is not the biggest structure on The Strip, though the dynamic external display punches above its weight in drawing eyes at a distance, and one of the many staff inside helping guide people through noted it’s 500+ steps from the top of the highest section (the upper 400s on level 7, yes that’s confusing) to ground. As you can imagine, trying to get 18,600 fans through everything and in to their designated seats in time for the first set with the requisite food, beverages and merchandise can be a challenge, but no one was aggressive and lines tended to move quickly enough. Prices for concessions weren’t cheap—though you could get a pour of Don Julio 1492 for only $56!—but they weren’t as bad as they could have been. My $25 prickly pear-rum Cosmopolitan came in a commemorative cocktail shaker I can put to use if I get back into making drinks at home. My mom had an adventure in tracking down a date-specific enamel pin that sold out quickly, with helpful folks from one of the Dead Facebook groups coordinating a trade with her. (We also found the guy flipping them in marked-up bulk at Shakedown Street.) Vegas certainly knows that keeping a friendly face on things is best to not dissuade you from further business.
Of course, that’s but the sideshow to the main experience: the shows in the Sphere itself. Let me just say: wow.
If you hadn’t picked up on it before, the Sphere is fucking huge. Unless you have the peripheral vision of a hawk or hammerhead shark, you physically cannot see the entirety of the display. I took these photos on my iPhone 13, mostly at 1.0x or 0.5x zoom. That small athletic track space at the bottom in many of them is the stage for the band. Those twigs by them are probably 20-30 foot tall lighting rigs to illuminate the band for screen-in-screen displays. My family and I were in the (lower) 400 sections for all 3 shows, which were cheaper but still ~$500 for all 3 days. From up there, I felt an inversion of the typical feeling about those who pay more for seats closer to the action: it seems we got a way better experience than those on the floor for GA or, perhaps even worse, the ‘obstructed view’ seats in the 100 section.
The graphics changed for each song of the sets, displaying different Dead-associated visuals. Despite the size, most of them felt warm and colorful and not clinically sterility like many neon-leaning EDM/tech grift graphics. Many were reused across multiple days of the weekend, which robbed the second and third shows of a bit of the novelty of the first, but for a band who prioritized sound quality and a general culture over cutting-edge visuals, I can understand this. It helped keep phones down most of the time at those shows. The second song of each show featured a vertigo-inducing ascent from the Haight-Ashbury Victorian where this all started nearly 6 decades ago into space and beyond; a few songs in to Thursday’s first set, a Sphere staff member was working the stairs between rows, asking if anyone needed a pair of earplugs or a barf bag.
Sound in the Sphere overall was fairly impressive. There are no visible speakers in the space, so there had to be a rig that would make the Wall of Sound look puny by comparison behind the displays, throwing sound hundreds of feet across the space to listeners while maintaining clarity all around. The mix was top-heavy, giving great clarity to the vocals, Mayer’s guitar, and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti’s work. The bass was low and quiet in the mix, which was a bit unfortunate, though Otiel Burbridge required a security detail from the Tuscany as he went around buying things from vendors at Shakedown Street before Saturday’s show. He got plenty of love from those there as he did so, so as someone who’s a bit more a casual fan of the Dead than most everyone else there, what do I know? It was also never overwhelmingly loud in the Sphere the way club shows can be; I kept my earplugs in most of the time during the shows, and did track down a pair of foam ones after misplacing my good ones heading in on the third night, but I wouldn’t have been too concerned about hearing damage in there, which is nice.
As I like to think I have an ear for what’s good with percussion, I found the drumming to be a bit lacking in the Sphere. I’m sure each of the 40+ pieces in the kits Hart and Jay Lane were drumming on has its purpose and is important enough to include, but I really could not hear much a difference between this snare, that cymbal etc. in their playing. That texture and pop was missing. At the same time, Hart is 80 years old, and doing Space solo meant he was the only member of the band not to take a mid-set break, so I officially blame the Sphere for that shortcoming. I don’t think there are many people among his peers who could hold things down behind a kit for 3+ hours 3 times a week like he did.
Also worth noting: the Sphere’s seats were equipped with rumble, haptics, or whatever you call the seat-shaking technology. This was used judiciously throughout—the ISS flying over during the second-song ascent always got a cheer—but really ripped during Drums. People mostly stuck to their seats as there wasn’t too much room to dance beyond swaying while standing up if you weren’t in the GA wings. I had expected the overall experience to resemble a planetarium’s light show on steroids, but in reality it was closer to an extended, extravagant Disney World movie-ride than anything.
While I feel the ‘controversy’ has been settled since 2019 at the latest by his persistence and the lack of decline in interest since he joined, it’s still worth noting: John Mayer is a good fit for this band, and a very good guitar player. It’s always odd to note his involvement with Dead and Company even though it’s been nearly a decade since he’s been involved, and he has probably been key to drawing in new fans and continuing the group’s relevance. For some, he will never be accepted, if only for the fact that he is not and cannot ever be Jerry, it’s insulting (to them) that he would even try to fill that role, and the whole Dead and Company project is a betrayal to the Grateful Dead proper following Fare Thee Well. The counterargument is simple: he’s a very talented guitar player. If he lacks a signature style or moves that are uniquely his, his strongest point would be in pulling transcendent moments out of a jam through his soloing. Multiple times throughout the weekend, I feared a song that started off at a slower pace would limp along as midtempo muck, but Mayer’s playing managed to transform those into highlights of the weekend. It’s an impressive feat to see happen in-person.
Overall, if you’re interested in these shows or anything else coming up at the Sphere: go. Get some tickets, figure out a hotel and airfare and other things to do in Vegas, and make it work. I don’t think you’ll regret doing so. It’s truly a unique experience that simply cannot happen elsewhere. The band added on a few more weekends as I was preparing to fly over for my weekend, and I’m sure there will be few complaints about them tacking on even more dates for as long as many of the principal players feel up for it, but you never know how long such an experience lasts. Ideally, it will never end, and the long strange trip it has been will continue indefinitely, but this fan base is well aware that the music does stop, often unexpectedly. The first showed closed with ‘Fire On The Mountain’ and an extended video tribute to superfan Bill Walton. His joyous face popped up as Drums got started, and Mayer and Weir’s primary guitars had number 32 decals on them. I think that was on Otiel’s shirt the first night too, and the other shows did end on a memorial image to Walton. I don’t believe he made it to the first or second weekends.
After an experience like this, I’m sure there’s some concern from you or others that future concerts could be ‘ruined’ or cannot possibly hold up in comparison. It’s a legitimate concern, but I don’t think that will be true. Sure, I think my lawn seat for Vampire Weekend at Northerly Island next month won’t hold a candle to this. And as someone who’s never gotten fully on the bus, for whom these 3 shows doubles the number of non-tribute Dead shows I’ve been at, I feel I’ve had my fill and don’t need to go back for another weekend of shows. Maybe if they’re still happening in 2026, I’ll return. That’s just me though, someone who definitely feels ‘done’ with a 3-day stand of something like this for a bit after.
But as much as the experience creates a kind of mass intimacy at a distance which cannot be replicated elsewhere, and while the extended universe is more than enough for many of its fans, the sheer variety of music out there and ways to experience it can be just as fulfilling. Since getting back from Vegas last Monday, I’ve been to 3 shows, and all 3 have been nice experiences. They’ve been way more intimate without a massive A/V setup needed to cut that distance, and I wouldn’t need to get through a security detail to talk to a band member either. Saturday night’s gig was a farewell show to Cruel, a local post-punk group who will be missed as a bright spot in the local scene, and a farewell far different from that of the Dead. I hung out with a friend and met his sister who seems as cool as him, and got to show them how cool of a spot Sleeping Village is. While the use of the singular in ‘a long strange trip’ implies a universality, the truth of the matter is that we’re all on our own trips, which intersect with others’, sometimes in passing, sometimes in greater detail. Hopefully more than occasionally, we link up and experience something incredible that lasts far beyond the time that makes up any evening, jam, or perhaps even a lifetime. Let’s hope the music never stops along the way.
I likely wouldn’t have listened to this record if I hadn’t put my music feed in the Bandcamp app on when going to one of my allergy shots recently, and as it’s probably my most played record since then, I’m glad I did. A nasty little slab of egg punk out of Antwerp, full of chicken scratch guitar, knotty rhythms, something approaching a psych-kraut buildup and more across 4 tracks and 11 minutes. The vocalist sounds a lot like the guy from Viagra Boys imo, and includes some iconic lines like “I don’t wanna know what goes on in a Reddit class” (I think). If you get the 7” from them (worth every inch), please let me know if the first couple plays throw bits of plastic or industrial dust at you from your turntable.
For many people, a long-running band’s peak era/lineup is the only material from them that matters. That’s very much true for CAN, with the departure of vocalist Damo Suzuki widely seen as marking the end of the band’s greatness, to be followed by a bunch of shabbier records that don’t compare to Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi and Future Days. (I am describing myself here.) The latest record in their live bootleg series complicates this narrative though, at least on the live side. Dating to 1977, when Holger Czukay switched fully to electronics and Traffic’s Rosko Gee joined on bass, the group remain in excellent form, rivaling the best of the prior entries in the series. Irmin Schmidt and Michael Karoli in particular deliver phenomenal performances, particularly on the tracks that aren’t riffing on the classic CAN numbers, and it’s still damn near impossible in my ears to top Jaki Liebezeit’s drumming. I wonder if there are other bands for whom this sort of perspective might be helpful.
It’s really unfortunate how contemporary French music, with some limited exceptions, goes underappreciated in the Angloshpere. This record by Jim Ballon, out on Tours’ Another Record, is a case in point here. It’s longform, meandering guitar work layered over a rhythmic body in a similar vein to what Oren Ambarchi does or Manuel Göttsching did, if the latter’s work was bathed in 90s tropes. Really good stuff somewhere between meditative and groovy, well worth a spin even if no one else is.
I’m always a little leery of Swedish records that pull from non-Western tropes or world music too strongly. Like, they’re usually fine, but I remain suspicious of the unconscious biases that might influence things, or present Sweden as better than other cultures, you know what I mean? That being said, wow. Simply wow. Black Truffle have uncovered a lost gem of an Afro-fusion classic with this record. You’ll have to defer to the label’s notes for the full breakdown, but the 4 tracks on offer here are at a level you rarely hear anywhere. That percussion on ‘Mimouna’? Simply phenomenal. A record well worth your time.
You won’t get a good sense of what Earth Ball is about based on the name—or their album title It’s Yours—so I’ll get to it and say that it’s a great slab of noise rock/free jazz. If you’ve ever listening to a The Dead C record and thought ‘You know what this could use? Some saxophone skronk!’ this one’s for you. If that doesn’t sound like you, feel free to stay away from this one.
Beak>, the Bristolian supergroup of Will Young, Billy Fuller, and Geoff Barrow—I think he was in Massive Attack too?—surprise released their 4th album after a 6-year gap. It continues in the vein of their prior albums, occupying a nebulous area between deconstructed rock, krautrock and no wave that’s singular in sound. For those who like weirdo grooves, songs like ‘Ah Yeh’ and ‘Secrets’ provide plenty of intrigue and reward multiple spins. If you’re a fan of greentext shitposting as well, the album title >>>> is a worthy depiction of what’s within.
A lot of this issue’s inclusions have been on the harsh side of things—can you tell work’s been getting to me recently?—but this record stood out even amongst the kind of grinding listening I’ve been favoring. The intrepid diggers at BBE found this small-run CD dating to 1997 from honestly who knows where, and knew they had to bring it to people’s attention. It’s an all-female gospel group, mixing in the sonics of MPB with some tasteful orchestral jazz. It’s hard to listen to this without a nice little smile on your face, that’s for sure.
Local post-punk group Model Living continue on in the darker post-punk vein with their second EP. They still sound like Protomartyr, perhaps with a sprinkling of FACS or some of the more political sprechsgesang-ers across the pond in there. Unfortunately I was feeling a little too wiped from Vegas and my flight back earlier in the day to make it to their free gig at the Empty Bottle last Monday, but they’ll be around a bit, I’m sure.
Ilian Tape produces another banger of a techno record from Deetron’s Soulmate alias. The non-‘Filter’ pair of tracks on here are particularly tight on my home speakers, and I imagine they’d keep the party going at a dancefloor near you.
I forget where exactly this record came onto my radar from—searching my inbox for their name returns a bunch of results from a meal kit delivery service—but I’m glad it did. Propulsive techno-electro hybrids getting kinda dubby and into breaks, this helped me power through a home workout yesterday, and is definitely solid otherwise.
Salford experimental institution Gnod are one of those groups that I feel like I should understand better than I do, but there’s something quintessentially British about them that doesn’t translate over despite the lack of a language barrier. Anywho, their latest album Spot Land has to be up there as some of their best work. It starts out in a post-industrial pastoral space, before building up to some evocative psychedelic, post-rock landscapes. Well worth a spin if you’re looking for something hazy and intriguing for your next smoke session.
That’ll do for issue #70 of Crow’s Nest. As always, thank you for reading, I hope you found something within that you enjoyed. I have a lot of words above for different things so I’ll leave it at that for this one. Until next time.
