THE MUSICAL BOX - 'A Rainy Night In Croydon'
Croydon Fairfield Halls, UK
November 12, 2009

Quality B+

A Trick Of The Tail Tour

CD1

01.Dance On A Volcano 
02.The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway 
03.Fly On A Windshield / Broadway Melody Of '74 (instrumental)  
04.Carpet Crawlers 
05.The Cinema Show 
06.Robbery, Assault & Battery 
07.White Mountain 
08.Firth Of Fifth 
09.Entangled

Time: 66'33"

CD2

01. Squonk 
02. Supper's Ready 
03. I Know What I Like 
04. Los Endos 
05. It / Watcher Of The Skies (Encore)

Time: 56'42"

When last at the Fairfield Halls, TMB used high-level speaker stacks suspended from the ceiling, suplemented by two smaller rows of speakers on the front of the stage. This time, all the speakers were at high level resulting in the vocals firing out about thirty feet above our heads. The end result was disappointing as I found myself watching the band play (very well as usual), but not getting the full vocal / instrument mix. In fact it was so bad that a number of people left the front row and went to sit at the back!

The show wasn't without incident either as Francois Gagnon's guitar pedals overheated at the end of FOF (and his amp shut down as a safety measure) resulting in Entangled being played at less than normal volume by Sebastien Lamothe and David Myers's. There was also a bit of heckling when one disgruntled fan shouted for the vocal sound to be sorted out. "You're not good tonight" he said "Cut the reverb on the vocals".

This was a show that I was looking forward to for so long, but by the end turned out to be a huge disappointment on a personal level. I had the best seat in the house (front row), but the worst in terms of accoustics and general sound.

However, I did capture the whole show including the encores from my front row seat. The speaking between the songs is almost inaudible and I have cut out some of the longer pieces of audience noise (e.g. before the encores). I have left in however, the large grizzly bear who was sitting behind me (purely for self-gratification) as he made me smile with his pver the top reaction to the songs.

I've called the 'A Rainy Night In Croydon' and produced artwork too for those that like to convert to CD. As the vocals are so low I'd put this as a B/B+, but you may hear differently.

Enjoy!

Lineage: Zoom H2 > HD via USB > Wavepad Master's Edition > High Pass filter and normalised > Easy CD-DA Extractor Professional > Flac (level 6). 


