Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

My Chemical Romance live on muffled C90 Bootleg Cassette

Last night I went to see My Chemical Romance live.  Or, if you wish, The Black Parade.  It was the third time I've seen them, due to a wife with a taste for their music.  That said, I enjoyed the last couple of times, and their latest album - also the Black Parade - is a superb piece of work.

[Deep Breath]

Hoooweeeverrrr...  The acoustics at the SECC (the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre) are terrible, and the sound engineers, after 23 performances in 23 nights, clearly couldn't be bothered to counteract the horrors of a vast, rectangular hall peppered with air-con ducts and wrapped in reflective metal and breeze-blocks.  As a result, the set was, depending where you stood, virtually unlistenable.  The hid-end of the guitar and vocals were pushed right up, and the kicker drumming was mixed incredibly high, while much of the rest of the drumming and low-end vocals were inaudible, and the bassist and keyboards might not even have been there.

There's no excuse for this: the Smashing Pumpkins had the same problem, sure, and Hall 3 is a graveyard for sound techs, but while clarity and acoustics can't be saved, you can at least mix the set with a bit of expertise and care.  There will have been a lot of kids there who simply didn't get a proper gig by their favourite band, and who've not been to enough sets to know any better.  I'm not being a neckbeard-wearing audiophile here: it sounded like someone had taken a muffled C90 bootleg recording recorded without noise-reduction, chucked the Dolby-C on to play it back, and just heaved one slider at the top and one at the bottom of their equalizer up.  Really horrible.

Having seen MCR's set only a few months ago, at the Barrowlands, I know that with a good sound crew they can dominate a room.  Comparing that version of Mama to the one last night, let alone the more complex sound of Helena, was like listening to two different songs.

The problem is not just the SECC's acoustics, even in Hall 3 (the worst of the lot).  Although the Smashing Pumpkins suffered just as badly, the Cure managed just fine in 1989, while Tool, before Christmas, sounded superb.  nor did Mastodon have any problems with their set.

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PS If you are an emo kid who loves Gerard and listens to MCR's music every night in their room for hours while looking at their myspace page and using messenger to talk to people with names like --^^::helena92xxx::^^-- then don't flame me about how stupid I am, etc etc...  It's the stupid SECC's fault.

PPS Paradoxically, the one bit that sounded great was the snippet of a cover of AC/DC's For Those About To Rock that they played between the two halves of their set.  A riff with that sort of raw power can survive even awful, awful production values.