Posted: 2017-11-12 01:10:50
Glad I'm out of there!
It was very, no, VERY disappointing tonight.
Was sitting smack bang in the middle at the back, quite high up - with a resulting view that can't be beaten, so: good for starters.
The Sweet Resistance opened the show - OK, after ol' Barney did, and then the ominous signs were on the wall: well, they were shaken off the wall to be precise, as the bass was the loudest aggressivest earthshaking painful thunder I've ever heard - in comparison to which underground blasting is a moffie! - easily drowning out the meagre midrange, and completely obliviating any highs, these were totally absent!
Ergo little music could be heard whilst one was physically fighting the impacts and the low rumblings, but... that was fine because this band did little to stir me, or most others by the looks of it.
However, the oke who mixes the various music channels and controls the equalizers should be shot: no mercy, he's a doos and doesn't have a clue about tonal balance.
After this ordeal was over some twat switches on bright, wait, BRIGHT, spotlights above the stage which are aimed straight back, towards several thousand people, blinding them for, erm, what, 15 minutes solid? You could not see what was going on on the stage but also, you could not look in the direction of it, these lights were really annoyingly bright..... why oh idiot, WHY did you switch them on, and worse, leave them on???
Shoot this fucker too!
One would expect that a band like Live has their own professional crew for mixing and lighting, but it appears that they left these people at home and made do with the morons present for this show. Because, when they started playing that bass was almost louder - almost, I think it was on Maximum already anyway.
The resultant audible blurr was tactile and shocking, never mind that Live played most of their shit songs.
But even their good songs were raped, by the avalanche of bass and lows, masking and drowning any other tonal group COMPLETELY: the vocals were hardly recognizable, there were zero high's so no crisp qualities at all, and to worsen any discomfort the arsehole manning the lights clearly took sadistic pleasure in flashing and aiming multiple batteries of bright focused spotlights right at the back were, what, some 4000 people were sitting, blinding them and robbing them from any view as to what was going on on the stage?
So, uncomfortably awful... but it got worse.
As time progressed the air became stale and awful, zero doubt solely due to the fact that a few hundred guys on the floor were 'vaping' - massive blasts of smoke were continuously erupting from there, polluting the air to a degree that I had to walk out - which I did, and outside I lit a cigarette. I smoke you see, but at least I have the decency to do this outside bothering noone, proving once again that people who vape are antisocial arseholes!
Because I walked around a bit I found out that those sitting up and next to the stage, on its sides, were spared this bass overload - it was actually bearable there, but once you got more in front of the stage you got literally jolted by these massive pressure waves, fucking awful!
This shows that the acoustics of this arena seriously suck, the MTN Dome is infinitely better in this respect!
I won't be back in this dump, they call it Menlyn Maine?
It's Mainely shit.
Start doing something about it, all the potential is there: get professional people who are not tonedeaf but can actually judge sound, after all the people want to hear music! Then also improve on the airconditioning, and getting a crew of bouncers who'll remove those vaping apes wouldn't be a bad idea either.
But, unless I will start hearing rave reviews from various sources in the future you won't see me back in that shithole!