Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum
Uniondale, NY
It’s not often that the Best Live Band on Earth (italics mine but not only mine) plays a show anywhere near where I live, so when it does, I go. It’s even rarer that this favorite living and live band of mine plays a show on the very same admittedly large street on which I was brought into this world six weeks early nearly twenty-nine years ago. It’s less than two miles as the crow flies – or drives, because it’s a straight shot – between Nassau Coliseum and the Nassau County Medical Center out on Long Island. It’s a coincidence that Muse scheduled a show at the first and I had a connection to the second, but it’s nothing spooky, only special.
I went with the Food Tour guys to the venue where I’d been a bunch of times for Islanders games and but only once for a concert (Incubus. Verdict: not good – if they’d have played any of my five favorite/popular songs of theirs it would have been okay, but nah, not so good). It’s impossible not to compare the venue to Madison Square Garden, where I’ve been for plenty of concerts but only one hockey game (Predators. Verdict: Rangers were not so good that night. But the beers were big and the hotdogs, more than footlong.) Nassau Coliseum is smaller, lower, the seats much more easily accessible. Signs for a booster club give it a distinctly suburban feel. Beer was plentiful and local and nearby, restrooms were mostly empty. There was no train station beneath it. There was twenty feet of hallway space between the outer doors and the inner doors, and a just a couple of flights up to the seats. Easy entrance, easy exit. Not bad. Some people call it a dump, but it was a fine place to see a show.
Metric opened. Metric is sort of like this decade’s answer to Blondie, if Debbie Harry were a foot taller and ten pounds lighter. They stuck to insistent, guitar-based pop songs, though, no ska, no rap. Some of the drumbeats felt stolen from 2005, for better or worse. Some writers think Muse selects offbeat openers, but Metric merely represents another kind of music they’ve incorporated into their eclectic style. I’ve seen them have Cold War Kids and Silversun Pickups open for them, so each arguably plays up a different facet of what they do.
And what they do, I think they do well. So well, in fact, that by their third number, “New Born,” they completely overpowered their own speaker system. The stage went conspicuously dark, the lasers shut down. All that was left was Dominic Howard keeping time in the darkness. The three of them soon escaped below deck for what was really a short period of time, maybe 90 seconds, before coming back and restarting during the instrument break. This was one of the most memorable moments of the show.
The whole thing felt a little out-of-body, because it was actually startlingly similar to their show from March 5 of this year that I saw at the Garden. This time, I’d gotten us whatever seats were left, way, way up, way, way over towards the side of the stage. Because of an overhang, I felt we were a little removed from the punch. In March, I was on the floor, maybe sixty feet, six inches from them, drunk not only on beer. I should have known it would be familiar as part of the same tour. While I’m always thrilled to see a band of their caliber I was also hoping for something a little more different. The songs were nearly identical – in fact, Muse didn’t play two songs they had in March. Here’s a setlist for this show, brought to you by the good people at setlist.fm. Mine, scrawled, was not as comprehensive.
The show still stacked up as one of the better concerts I’m sure to see. On the stage were three columns wrapped in screens to look like buildings. While silhouettes spend a few minutes marching and lining up. A body falls, and then the curtains fall, and Muse goes into “Uprising.” They’re on platforms twenty or thirty feet in their air, platforms that two songs down will lower (and eventually rise again). Other columns hang over them like stalactite. Matthew Bellamy is wearing a suit from the near future. It’s silver and over the course of the night, will reflect almost perfectly any direct light he stands in front of. Chris Wolstenholme headbangs sturdily off to stage left. The drummer’s in the middle. His platform will spin.
The most impressive songs were “New Born,” in spite of the sound difficulty and not just because of the lasers, “Time is Running Out,” and the extraterrestrial “Knights of Cydonia.” “Feeling Good” always gets me singing along and you might now hear it pitching Virgin Airways. “Starlight” got the crowd the most involved, I think. An old favorite of mine, “Guiding Light,” did not pack the same emotional punch for me, but believe me when I write that’s a good thing. This time around they didn’t play anything from their first album and only a few of the hits from the next two. Not a bad mix, really, but it’s how it goes when you’re supporting an album, I guess, but I do really like a lot of their lesser known tracks and singles, especially hearing them in person.
Overall, worth it. No doubt. I’m thrilled for them and for us that they’ve gotten big enough to play more far-flung arenas. Perhaps I should be more dispassionate in my reviewing, but I can’t help that I like them because they’re just a really good band, excellent performers playing good songs. They might be a touch over the top but with a sound and presence as big as theirs, I think the accused is entitled.