Seeing the show in Madison tonight! They last minute chose a local band to open the show, which is pretty awesome. Agreed that the setlist looks great for this tour.
I'm going to get my tickets to see JEW in December but it's a radio fest so they'll probably play like 10 songs :(
If I'm looking at the same setlist as everyone else.. it seems pretty predictable. IMO the best sets were around "Damage" when they broke out "Kill," "Chase This Light," "Always Be," and other deep cuts. Hopefully some more get added in as the tour goes on.
when i saw JEW in 2010 (i think), i swear it was the best setlist ive ever seen any band do in my life
I think You With Me sounds like it belongs on Futures too. It would fit right in somewhere between Polaris and 23 - its got too atmospheric and minor a tone for Chase This Light I like it more than I did on first listen, just not sure I like it as an opener.
Agreed, when i saw them they also played SOMST following Futures. Was amazing seeing 'Kill', 'Polaris', and 'Disintegration' live.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I feel like album leaks are nowhere near as common as they used to be. I have no numbers to back that up, but generally I'm seeing that a lot of the bigger albums are being kept under wraps quite well until just a couple of days before worldwide release. I feel like it used to be the case 10-15 years ago that it was pretty much expected that you'd have an album and its demos like a month before release. Not for all bands of course. Maybe it's because of improvements to watermarking technology meaning more labels actually use them, or just a greater hesitancy resulting from being hit repeatedly by leaking culture, or I'm just completely off base. To be honest I'd be very surprised if this hits the internet before next Wednesday or Tuesday at the earliest. Obviously you expect things to hit the web before US release because of territories ahead in the time zone and orders arriving early from online stores etc. I'd almost not even consider those "leaks" by that point though, when it's so close to release. If you look at kingdom-leaks, only 10 of 22 albums releasing this Friday have leaked. That's surprisingly low (I think) given that's less than 48 hours away (AU time zone).
"You Are Free" has been stuck in my head all day. I need the studio version ASAP!! Hoping they'll do one more pre-release and it's this one..
A lot of people seem to assume that bands leave tracks off of records because they think they aren't good enough.. but that's not always true. In a lot of cases certain songs (no matter how great they are) just don't have a place on a certain record, and I think the best albums in general seem to be the ones where the sequencing actually matters and the content flows together. I respect when artists really try and keep the integrity of the original vision and don't just throw a bunch of random songs together
I disagree strongly about "Step One" - I think it would fit perfectly on Damage. Plus I think quality-wise, both lyrically and musically, it is miles ahead of "Byebyelove". To me it's not even close. I do respect what you are saying about bands creating a cohesive album and not just tossing a bunch of good songs together - but the flip side of that is when you have a song as weak as "Byebyelove" and a b-side as great as "Step One" I don't see how the far better song doesn't make for a better overall album. It goes without saying that all of that is just my opinion which doesn't matter one bit compared to the band who is putting the album out.