2001-04-15 - Portland
Sound
I listened to the unedited recording and was impressed. It was very good throughout but just falls under that magic 4 star/excellent audience bracket. Individual crowd members were too prominent but there was a generally nice overall ambiance. Adam was pretty non existent and Edge was weak at times.
3.5/5
Performance
As the positives are few and far between I shall start by mentioning them first.
-Beautiful Day was nailed. Great vocal strength for 'Goal Is Soul!!'
-A few nice historical references from Bono (briefcase, Larry Mullen Band etc)
-I enjoyed The Sweetest Thing. Nice fun number and general crowd pleaser.
-Staring At The Sun was a nice snippet but the crowd should have taken up the chorus and they just didn't
. (See 2001-08-19 - London to hear the difference)-Gone was good.
-Good to hear a proper length Bad but I can see why they shaved a few minutes off it for the rest of the tour. They ended the song then tried to seuge into Streets and they just didn't get it right.
Dislikes :
-Apart from whats mentioned above, I have no standout memories. The crowd was reasonably good but not excellent.
-Sunday Bloody Sunday was sooo flat. Listen to the opening guitar part, theres no power in it.
-Desire was dreadful. They hadn't decided yet whether to play it acoustically or half rocky and the performance suffered for it.
-From Discotheque to Bad (barring Sweetest Thing) the gig hit the floor. No life or enthusiasm.
-One/Amazing Grace/I Remember You just took out all the pace of the show again.
5/10
Summary
Mostly unimpressed. I'll keep The Sweetest Thing on the iPod but the rest shall be deleted to free up some much needed hard drive space. It was still early on the tour and the band obviously didn't know which direction to go. The setlist structure was very stop.start.stop.start and thus didn't flow to well. No stand out moments worth remembering. As a big fan of the Elevation Tour I have been left a little cold.
