Audio By Carbonatix
LADY GAGA
Monster Ball Tour, with Semi-Precious Weapons
7.28.10 | Pepsi Center, Denver, CO
Before last night’s show, I wasn’t a fan of Lady Gaga. I liked her, mind you. I enjoyed her bizarro-world take on pop, her outlandish videos, the way she she combined all of that and her weirdo persona into a constant piece of performance art, and I even thought she had a couple of genuinely decent tunes. But a fan? That would have been pushing it. Now, I’m a fan. If you’ll forgive the indulgence, let me just say: I’m gaga for Gaga.
See photos from the Lady Gaga concert after-party.
I’ll go ahead and spoil the rest of this review so you rock snobs and haters can jump ahead and leave me a comment telling me what a giant fucking douchebag I am: Last night’s show was, simply put, one of the best shows I’ve ever seen in my life. Period. Full stop.
Now, as a concert, it was merely very good — if you can qualify “very good” with “merely.” Turns out, apart from all the foofara and what not, Lady Gaga is quite a performer in a strictly musical sense. Not world-class, blow-you-away, “holy shit that was the most awesome thing ever” performer — not yet, anyway.
See a full slideshow from last night’s Lady Gaga concert at the Pepsi Center.
But she can sing, she can shout, she can goddamn well work a crowd and she even played some fine piano. I’m sure some of it was canned, but from what I could tell (and admittedly, it’s hard to tell these days), she was actually pulling most of the singing and piano-ing off live. And doing a fine job of it.
She played all the hits, everything you’d expect: “Poker Face,” “Telephone,” “Alejandro,” “Just Dance” and a killer encore of “Bad Romance.” Had it been just the music, just the concert, I would have had a fine time, certainly. But the concert was just the beginning — I said this one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.
Shall we start with the crazy projections? The weird little narrative structure that ran through the show? The unbelievably elaborate costumes? The choreographed dance numbers? The audience participation? Ooh, I know — let’s start with the flaming piano.
Let me simply say, I am congenitally unable to not love anyone who plays a piano that shoots a fifteen-foot high column of flame in the air. It’s just in my DNA to love that. Probably something to do with my redneck past, growing up in a place where monster truck rallies were the biggest events to come through town. Anyway, somewhere in the middle of the show she sat down at a piano to play “Speechless,” which happens to be one of my favorite Gaga tunes.
