I'm definitely glad I made it out to this show. He's been doing it for a long time now, and he knows how to properly present his theatrical styles in a live setting. I literally walked in the door right when the opening DJ started his set.
CX Kidtronik (pictured above) is a solo artist signed to Stones Throw, so I was already in the know about what he might do. The other time I saw Saul Williams in concert, CX was also part of his band, and his synths and drum programming are a large part of the musical backdrop of Saul's set. Anyways, back to the DJ set.... He was sloppy as fuck, but it honestly didn't matter, because he was seriously throwin down the jams. He was playing music for about an hour before the rest of the band took the stage. I heard a wide range of artists and styles, such as: Led Zeppelin, Tech N9ne, The Ramones, Rick James, Madlib, Ministry and C.S.S..... He closed out his DJ set with some hard sounding dubstep, which I thought was going to make Saul's set seem tame at first, but no.
Saul has a very aggressive live show, both in vocal tone, and in musical style, but it's not the type of aggressive most people are used to. They really had the percussion sounding extra tight between the actual drummer, CX Kidtronik and his MPC stuff, and the other guy who was playing trumpet and trombone for parts of songs and also had his own percussion instruments as well, so when all of them were jamming, it sounded like a lot more than 4 people up there. Saul also had this weird, flat, painting canvas looking surface that he was periodically using as a percussion instrument as well. It kinda made him seem like a marching band leader at times.. haha...
He busted out some of his poems a few times during the night, but the set mostly consisted of songs from his new album, "Volcanic Sunlight", which i'm iffy about the studio version of, but he did all the songs live really well. He also played a lot of tracks from his self titled album from 2004, which i'm a big fan of. What he didn't do was play any "Niggy Tardust" songs, and that was my only complaint. At least he did "List Of Demands" which randomly appears as a bonus track on "Niggy Tardust" but is actually from the self-titled album originally. That's one of those songs that I feel he should do at every show. It's interesting to see how decent of a singer he's become. I found myself enjoying a lot of the more croony songs than the ones with rap sounding vocals.
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