September 04
Cathedral Square..
OK Go gets going at Turner Hall
Most bands throw picks into the crowd. OK Go throws tambourines. It was a minor but telling highlight of the band’s 21-song, career-spanning set when guitarist Andy Ross tossed his tambourine so deep into the throng of people at Turner Hall Friday night that he nearly hit the soundboard. This is a band that takes its live show as seriously as its famous videos and its music.
But not more so than the fans that made them viral and eventually international sensations; and the energy it collectively brought to Turner Hall was enough to even get the parents of the show’s many high school-aged attendees bobbing their heads in appreciation.
It was a multimedia extravaganza from start to finish, lacking in neither creativity nor audience involvement. It took until the second song, “White Knuckles” (best known for its wallpapered music video), for the confetti to first rain down upon the appreciative mass of fans, a recurring event as the show progressed. And the band’s performance of “What to Do” was made notable by their use of only handbells for its instrumentation, a brilliantly vaudevillian performance that was both hilarious and haunting.
Music videos were projected onto an immense video screen behind the band. Live microphone-mounted camera feeds, and other assorted clips and graphics the band had strewn together for the show, and the whole concert managed somehow to simultaneously recreate the feel of both incredibly intimate and incredibly huge performances.
Some moments were profoundly personal, as when lead singer Damian Kulash ventured out into the crowd for a guitar-tuning-interrupted acoustic performance of “Last Leaf.” Others were grandiose, outlandish, and ostentatious; the encore was played entirely with guitars with lasers attached to their heads (insert Austin Powers joke here), a DIY lightshow that was as kitschy as anything else OK Go had to offer but much more spectacular.
The band made an obvious attempt to move past its best-known hit, 2006’s “Here It Goes Again,” a decision made clear by the fact that the song was neither the show’s opener nor closer, instead being buried deep in the middle of the 90-plus-minute set. It was a resolution that, for all its good intentions, may have backfired; the crowd lost a substantial amount of energy once their favorite song had been played, as if they had no reason to be there anymore.
To its credit, the band remained unaffected, and a show that had never been lacking in creativity became more and more absurd – and equally great – as it progressed towards the brilliant Daft Punk-esque final encore. Although it does make sense that a group that has yet to lose an ounce of energy over the course of three albums would remain manic and bizarre for one memorable night.
I love OKGO