And it was one of the most awesome nights of my life.
The band was amazing live. If you're an Incubus fan (like I am!) and you've seen their concert videos (like I have!), you probably know that they sound exactly the same live as they do in their recordings. Even Brandon Boyd with those high-flying vocals.
So it's no surprise that actually experiencing their performance in the flesh felt surreal. Like Am-I-here-or-am-I-watching-a-DVD surreal. At times, I was singing/cheering/screaming my lungs out; at other times, I just stood there, speechless, like a kid who just entered Willy Wonka's factory. I'm pretty sure everyone else in the jam-packed Araneta Coliseum felt the same.
The concert was part of their "If Not Now, When?" world tour, so of course, it was sprinkled with new songs off their new album. But majority of the show was still about the Incubus songs we have known and memorized. Some of the crowd favorites that night were "Megalomaniac" (the opener), "Pardon Me", and "Drive".
But it wasn't all smooth-sailing. In fact, it went awry right during their first song, when Mike Einziger's guitar equipment flipped out on him. In frustration, he slammed his guitar on the floor twice. Luckily, the crew were quick enough to fix things and Mike was back just in time for the song's bridge.
What teeny glitches there were in the show, the band completely made up for with their performances. Especially with their encore.
Boyd had said goodnight by the end of "A Crow Left of the Murder", but every Incubus fan knew there was a lot more for the night. The coliseum boomed with shouts of "We want more! We want more!" Before long, the band was back on stage, and the crowd went wild when the opening notes of "I Miss You" started to play. It was arguably the most magical (pardon the cliché) part of the concert: midway into the song, at the start of the second verse, the sound of the instruments faded away, and only the voices of Boyd and the admiring crowd remained to sing the love song.
The band aptly chose to cap the two-hour show with "Nice to Know You". Up to the very last lines (Nice to know you, goodbye / nice to know you / to know you!), the venue was alive with that exciting, electric energy of pulsing veins and exhilaration.
Here's a peek into that unbelievable encore and finale:
So how else can I describe a concert experience with one of my favorite bands in the world? Words won't exactly cut it.
The only plain vanilla thing that night was me wearing a simple white-shirt-and-jeans ensemble. What would you wear to your next concert trip?
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