It’s been a week and a bit since I attended the crazy sold out Sampha show at the Mod Club. Usually I’ll post my reviews of a concert in a few days, but for some reason, I was struggling to put together words for this show and many others lately. Have I hit the wall? Do I have writers block? But then I thought about it, and really dug deep within my soul and thought .. what do people really want out of concert reviews?
As part of my real life job, we have to always consider the user experience when introducing new features or functionality to the thing I work on. No functionality is built without user stories, so I asked myself, what is the user story here, for a reader to read a concert review. Now, obviously being very lazy, I decided not to actually research this part. I decided to rely on my own experience as a consumer of other blogs. These are the conditions on which I usually find myself reading concert reviews. There are basically two scenarios.
Scenario 1 – Should I go?
In this scenario, you are unsure of the act. This might be a result of a few things
– You don’t know the artist
– You are skeptical the artist is good live
– You want to know if it’s a fun time.
You want to hear from a trusted source (or multiple untrusted sources) to determine if it’s worth your time and money.
Scenario 2 – Was I right?
In this scenario, you just attended a show. You have an opinion on it, but you don’t know if anyone else agrees. So you google for others opinions.
So based off those scenarios, I’m guessing people really just want to know a few things.
1. Was the show good?
2. What songs did they play?
3. How was the energy of the crowd?
4. How was the energy of the artist?
5. Did anything weird or funny happen?
6. What food did you eat after the show?*
Let’s just answer those questions. We’ll answer the questions in reverse order.
5. Did anything weird or funny happen?
No. Although I went to see 6Lack at the same venue three weeks ago and I was very aggressively patted down, this time, they just let me walk through. Very inconsistent security strategies at the Mod Club.
4. How was the energy of the artist?
At first I thought Sampha was pretty content to just hide behind the dark lighting and his rig and sing from there, like the shy producer stereotype. However, perhaps sensing that he would need to build a better identity if he were to be featured on bigger (re: festival) shows, Sampha actually took to the front of the stage and sang and danced to all the upbeat (for him) tracks. He spoke to the crowd and really worked to put on a full show. You can always tell when an artist is going through the motions and this was not the case. The man dug his music and why not? it’s great.
3. How was the energy of the crowd?
I’m so old, people were drinking and dancing on a Sunday night. I’m like, how do you muster this shit? I had decaffeinated green tea before the show. The crowd was hyped. There wasn’t a lot of room to move but people made their best efforts. Head bobbing ratio was high.
2. What songs did they play?
All the songs.
1. Was the show good?
Yes, from the opening track Plastic 100C to the hit Blood On Me to the set closer Indecision, Sampha and his band were on point. It woulda been easy to rely on samples and hide under the “producer” guise but Sampha took a full band and the result was much livelier and fresh sound. They even all did that whole let’s all play percussions at the same time for the track Without. It was pretty cool but I feel like a lot of bands do that now. Still, it was a good time.
So what I’m basically saying is you should go to a Sampha show.