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Rating: Have you ever experienced those exhausting weeks when you reach Friday with the only desire to sleep? Well, that's the physical and mental state in which I approached this concert, just in time to drain my last ounces of energy!
The Container Club in Bologna isn't very large, but it seems perfectly suited for concerts of this size and fills up quickly from 10:30 pm.
While waiting for Lali Puna, here comes Alias (?): Californian, with a rugby player's build, street rapper's outfit, piercing on the edge of his mouth, and a cap pulled over his eyes like Badly Drawn Boy.
He starts with a couple of jokes ("Hi, my name is Milli Vanilli!", then something against Bush, and then how cool Italy is, blah blah blah) before setting himself up with electronic gadgets to begin a proper instrumental drum & bass DJ set: some parts weren't bad, but nothing groundbreaking.
The Lali Puna kept us waiting until past midnight (!), due to what would become somewhat of a recurring theme in their performance: Valerie Trebeljahr greeted and explained that they had some issues with the laptop (a Powerbook Macintosh! And if it's true that "Micronomic" mocks Micro$oft, perhaps it was divine punishment!).
It's amusing to see the different attitudes on stage from the four: Markus Acher seems to be in a loop, starting to sway with his head down from the first song, and I believe he continued even during the breaks between songs and encores (for the record: there were two), whereas Valerie doesn't betray her Asian origins, with all the accompanying shyness/reserve/restraint that makes her sway with composure, while at the back the drummer beats like a blacksmith (exhausted by the end of a particularly long song, which elicited a compassionate smile from the singer) and the other keyboardist indisputably wins the "best supporting actor" award of the evening.
I mentioned technical issues earlier: after the computer issue, they all more or less had problems with the monitors, and he kept making gestures ("raise here, lower there") to the guy at the mixer until he got fed up and started using headphones.
At that point, it was the mixer guy who teased him about the way he moved with those admittedly oversized headphones!
Could it end there? Absolutely not! Revenge was served when the keyboardist, somewhere between impatient and amused, went to the mic at the end of a song and jokingly said some dirty things in Teutonic language: my German is quite rusty, but I believe he reminded him that it wasn't the first time such incidents had occurred and it was time for him to learn how to do his job!.
How to lighten the mood and have fun: score 5.
During one of the encores, Alias reappeared, accompanied by Lali Puna's music, and began his personal flood of words, a very fast rap in which he uttered more words in 3 minutes than I do in a whole week: the result, contrary to what might seem, wasn't bad at all!
"Yes, but how did they play? Are they good?" you may be asking.
The concert was very enjoyable; fortunately, the technical problems only delayed the start and caused some "feedback" issues for them, not for the audience.
In fact, I must say that the acoustics seemed more than good!
They started with many tracks from the latest "Faking the Books," then moved on to older songs and closed with the newly released album. But these are just words: a concert needs to be "felt," and this one fully satisfied me, even though I was... exhausted!
See, the fact that it managed to wake me up for a few hours despite the tiredness is more indicative than technical analysis of which songs they played, etc., etc.
Bravo Lali Puna, and if you ever get the chance to see them live, don't let it slip by!
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