A Good Idea

Bob Mould @ Irving Plaza 10/5/05
In a word, this show was great. For the first time in many years, Bob Mould went out on tour with a full band (including Brendan Canty of Fugazi on drums!) and along with the requisite 5-6 numbers from his excellent new full-length Body of Song, they played 7 songs from Sugar's Copper Blue and a mini-set of about 5 Husker Du songs, all at a really loud volume (I'm glad I brought my earplugs!). One of the highlights was an excellent version of "High Fidelity" from the new one. It's a song that I first heard Bob perform live when I saw him play a solo show at my college back in 1997.

Of course, new songs and solo material weren't the reasons that I bought the ticket, however. All of the Sugar songs aside from "A Good Idea" (which just sounded off; it was the only misstep of the night aside from his solo college-radio hit "See A Little Light", which is a great song but it doesn't work with a full band) absolutely rocked and the Husker Du songs did as well, though most of them were played at breakneck, almost thrashy speeds that were faster than the respective recorded versions. With that said, it was still great to see them play this material, which included "Chartered Trips", "Could You Be the One", live favorite "Celebrated Summer" and the uncharacteristically (for Husker Du) brooding, slow, breakup ballad "Hardly Getting Over It". The crowd (myself included) enjoyed it immensely and it was definitely by far the higlight of the night for me. And even better, for the last song of the 2nd encore, he finished the night off with "Makes No Sense at All" from 1985's incredible Flip Your Wig. What a fitting end to a great night!

Oh, the above picture was taken from Chrome Waves, who went to the Toronto show. Check it out. It's a great site.