ironSoap – Complete

Despite having attended dozens of shows across Northern California since my first genuine concert experience when I was maybe 15, I have somehow never had opportunity to visit Berkeley’s Greek Theater. The outdoor, concrete amphitheater is kind of like a happily intimate cross between the rugged spectacle of Mountain View’s Shoreline and the classy architecture of many of San Francisco’s indoor venues like the Warfield. It’s a nice place to catch a concert, especially in the pleasant weather of late June.

The triple-billed show started with Kimbra, a performer I had practically zero exposure to other than watching half a YouTube video on the BART ride over to the show. I was pleasantly surprised by her performance. It’s never easy to be an opening act, but Kimbra made the wise decision to stick to uptempo, high-energy tracks and while she won’t win any dance competitions, her stage presence was engaging and entertaining. I was left after the short set with the conviction to definitely devote some time to checking out her catalog.

Up next was Mayer Hawthorne, a curious sort of band that brought to mind the self-aware throwback irony of a hipster Chris Isaak. Hawthorne and his band played retro-tinged jazz/funk fusion tracks that were enjoyable enough but hardly noteworthy. Still, I’m of the opinion that any band that can nail You Make My Dreams Come True so hard they might as well have hit it with a hammer can’t be <i>all</i> bad. I wasn’t, however, nearly as compelled to add Hawthorne to my favorite playlists as I was with Kimbra.

Once night began to fall, the stage was set for the headliners and Foster the People came out of the gate with a strong sequence including Miss You (a strange but sort of effective opener), Life on the Nickel and Helena Beat. An early highlight was a track that doesn’t appear on the band’s album, Torches, Broken Jaw, but it was followed by the midtempo I Would Do Anything For You that kind of sucked the energy from the show for a bit. It did work well to pave the way for the astounding rendition of Waste, a song that on the album has potential but comes across as a bit flat. Here, though, amid a shower of bubbles and the backdrop of the stellar lights show, it owned the moment profoundly.

From this high though the show seemed to start to falter. Another non-album track (possibly a new song?) called Love and then lackluster renditions of Call It What You Want, Don’t Stop and, most disappointingly, Warrant led to the sagging middle of the show. At this point I started noticing that Mark Foster (and the whole band really) were showing the effects of what Foster himself referred to as “nearly 300 shows in a year and a half.” Obviously this much touring is a drain, but it seemed that the band relied too heavily on the stage production to carry the energy and it was clear from this lull that the spectacle wasn’t enough to keep up with the noticeable lack of gumption from the performers.

Fortunately the show ended with Kimbra returning to stage alongside Foster while the band took a break and they re-created their song Warrior. Foster then laid down a rendition of Houdini featuring the UC Berkeley Marching Band that re-ignited the crowd and really ended on a high note. The short encore featured the also non-album song Ruby, a slow piano ballad that I don’t think Mark really sold 100%, but the song itself is nice. Then, of course, they ended the night on the ubiquitous radio hit, Pumped Up Kicks which didn’t quite match the intensity of either Waste or Houdini, or even Broken Jaw, but seemed to thrill the majority of the crowd.

My overall takeaways are that I felt the band digressed too often into long, meandering instrumental interludes and tried too often to play with the “up and down” vibe that bands who aren’t all high-energy all the time seem compelled to do. Some acts are better than others at pulling this off. I feel that there’s obviously nothing wrong with playing lower key or slow songs in concert, but those tracks tend to need to be anthemic, sing-along songs that the frontman can practically hold the mic out to the audience and have them cover. This wasn’t the case with Foster the People and it showed. I would have liked to see some fun injected into the setlist as well, perhaps a well-timed cover or a favorite cut from Torches re-interpreted. This is especially true in the case of Pumped Up Kicks which I got the impression the band was already kind of sick of, unfortunate since it was probably the song most of the attendees had come to hear. If not the “signature” tune, at least one of the mid-section songs like Warrant could have used either a dance-remix vibe or perhaps even a stripped-down acoustic version to draw the interest back downstage instead of fixating on the flashing sun-face light element that conjured Torches cover artwork by Japayork.

I found it to be a good show, though, overall, and one I’m very glad I went to see. Occasionally the acid test for how well I liked a concert is whether or not I think I’d make a point to pay to see the headliners again if they came back to town and in this case while I have no regrets at all, I’m not sure I’d make Foster the People an appointment act, content to say that I saw them when and save my money and time for other groups that may tour as much or more as this hard working band without ever letting on.