Tilt Buster: The Killers in Concert at UC Irvine

Posted by icemonkey9 on Sep 25, 2009 in tiltbuster | 0 comments

As part of a new series of features, I'll talk about things I do to get myself off of tilt.  The first was a rock concert I went to for the popular alternative rock band, The Killers earlier this month.  The performance was at UC Irvine's Bren Events Center, which fits about 5,000 people.

My wife and I went and met up with some friends about three full hours before the concert started as we planned to rush the stage and be right up front for it.  We were definitely successful in doing that and spent three hours shooting the breeze with idle talk and playing Scrabble on my wife's iPhone.  That game is damn addicting.

Once we got in I debated on getting a t-shirt and just decided what the heck so I shelled out the $30 which is pretty standard at a concert.  It's a kick ass shirt ... the only problem is that the XL was extremely thin and small-ish and made me look like an overweight linebacker.  For the record I'm 5'11" and have very broad shoulders ... anyways I am sure once I wash this thing once it'll become part of the wife's collection.

The first band to come out represented my home town of San Diego. They had a "talented" lead singer who was also the lead guitarist and presumably featured his friends and two girlfriends.  They were exceptionally mediocre and his last song that featured the tag line (imagine some beatnik looking as serious as possible): "When the beat comes down, you better take cover!" and then played a really average C+ song with that chorus.

The second band to come out was some modern Mexican Mariachi band that kind of sounded like a mellow Mexi-Sublime.  The lead singer would say before every song the name of the song and who the song was for.  Every song they played sounded very similar and it was about the third song when they lost the crowd. By the last song he said, "this is our last song" which the crowd cheered for, and of course I heckled (not too loud, just so the people around me near the front of the stage could hear), "This song is called 'Getting Our Asses Off the Stage' and it's for ourselves because people want to see The Killers!" and we all had a good laugh. Anyways once they were done we were ready to rock, and rock we did.

The Killers came out to "Spaceman" and proceeded to rock the joint for about 1.5 hours.  They played all their hit songs and lead vocalist Brandon Flowers worked the crowd fantastically.  I had heard they weren't all that great live, but I have no idea what those people were thinking, these guys were great.  All in all it was a fantastic concert and a lot of fun to be SO close with a band I really enjoy listening to. On tilt? Go to a rock concert. It kicks ass.

Here are some pictures I took myself!

Lead singer Brandon Flowers

Lead guitarist Dave Keuning

Lead guitarist Dave Keuning at the end of "Human" if memory serves correctly