Concert

Echo and the Bunnymen

The Paradise

October 4

The second-to-last song I saw Echo and the Bunnymen perform at the Paradise on Monday night was entitled "Nothing Lasts Forever," which appropriately sums up my exact feelings toward the horribly sad spectacle I witnessed.

Echo and the Bunnymen emerged from the post-punk scene of Liverpool in England in the late '70s, and injected a shot of desolation into the synthesized neon colors of the New Wave music scene. While their debut album Crocodiles held compositions of jarring angst, later albums like Ocean Rain promised gentle beauty. However, by the time the group broke up in 1988, it was a shadow of its former self. Still, the group recovered from the tragedies of original drummer Pete DeFreitas' death and suspect musical side careers and finally resurfaced with Evergreen in 1997. 1999 saw the release of What Are You Going To Do With Your Life?, a quiet affair spotlighting Ian McCulloch's smooth vocals over quieter instrumentation.

However, those in the audience expecting the same were sorely disappointed. While it's understandable that those classic Bunnymen high notes are probably unreachable now, most of what McCulloch hoarsely sang/said was rendered a mush of garbled noise. Classics like "Rescue," "Crocodiles," "Bring On The Dancing Horses" and "The Killing Moon" were painfully weak renditions of the originals.

Admittedly, McCulloch is notorious for being difficult to understand onstage. However, that was no excuse for his distasteful attitude to everybody, which must have had something to do with one of the guitarists slamming down his instrument and leaving the stage during the middle of "Lips Like Sugar." And after that fiasco it almost seemed as though McCulloch deliberately screwed up the timing of the lyrics just to see how far he could push the remaining members of the band. Which is a shame, because the highlight of the show was the concise and biting instrumentation by the rest of the band, which was musically perfect and sonically explosive.