Thursday night I caught The Church @ Mississippi Studios - for their 30th Annv tour. Wow what a great idea for a show and very well executed. They played 2 sets with a short break, performing one song from every major (& some minor) album they've released in reverse chronological order. So they started with Pangea from Untitled #23 and ended with Tear it All Away from their very first album, The Church.
While this was billed as an acoustic show I would call it semi-acoustic, since all they did was trade out the electric guitars for acoustic guitars. SK still used his electric bass, TP had a pretty standard drum kit, and they used a bit of keyboards as well. The result worked great. They reworked a number a songs, but the presentation in this format was much more agressive than you might expect from an acoustic show. I know when I think of an acoustic show I think of a more mellow/relaxed show. While the band seemed fairly relaxed, except maybe SK, this certainly was more of a rock show.
A great example of this was the song Invisible,which is a beatiful song from After Everything Now This. This is a soft almost delicate song, and that is how it started but about half way through they really turned it up a notch and started to really drive the song and made a couple of well placed diversions, including a verse from VU's Heroin, before the song came to a closing cresendo.
The songs for the most part were introduced along with the album, but the historical info was kept, for the most part, fairly breif. This was not a "Storytellers" show per se. The between banter was just that and not alot of reminisence. The band was in fine form and played great. They were even able to mix things up a bit on the song list even though you knew which album was up next. For instance they did The Ungaurded Moment early in the set as it was also included on El Momento Descuidado which was released in 2004. And they did come back out for a short encore set.
During the encore they talked about getting directed to youtube to see Billy Corigan perform Reptile. There was quite a bit of discussion about the "tunic" Billy was wearing in the video (you should check it out as it's a bit tough to accurately describe). But in return the did probably the best version of The Smashing Pumpkin's Disarm I've ever heard, it was stellar. They closed the show with a great version of a particular favorite of mine, Grind from the under appreciated Gold Afternoon Fix. The venue, Mississippi Studios, is a very intimate place, it holds maybe 150 people. So, as a big fan of The Church I couldn't ask for much more.
Sorry no great pics like low.pfile posted.
