Online Concerts: Glass Animals Review
Photo taken by: POONEH GHANA
Events across the world quickly came to a halt in March of 2020. Less than a week before English band Glass Animals were scheduled to perform at an intimate venue in Seattle, WA, State Governor Jay Inslee announced the ban of events with over 200 people due to the global pandemic COVID-19.
Washington State was the first place in the United States to have an outbreak and because of that concerts and other events here were some of the first places in the country to shut down. The event bans are still pretty strict here not even allowing Drive In concerts to take place.
This year I’ve been listening to digital music a lot more and one of my favorite releases has been Glass Animals’ third studio album Dreamland. The album features 16 songs and features a guest appearance from rapper Denzel Curry. When the band announced that they would be doing an online concert I was extremely excited because if Glass Animals online show was anything like their live shows, I knew it would be stellar. With the band pre-selling over 15,000 tickets for the online concert I think it’s safe to say that many others thought the same thing!
If you’re reading this you’re probably wondering what the online concert was like and I am here to tell you my review of this online show. First off I want to say the production was so seamless, something that is hard to achieve in live concerts due to time constraints. This online concert felt more like a 70 minute music video with how well orchestrated the production was, I never once saw any cameramen despite their being multiple camera angles.
Glass Animals released a new version of their song Tangerine that featured Arlo Parks that they performed during the show. The stream also had another guest performance with Denzel Curry during Tokyo Drifting which was another song from their latest album. The band caught me off guard when they brought out another special guest who was a contortionist, something you don't usually see at Glass Animals concerts. One of my favorite parts of the show’s production was during the song Hot Sugar when vocalist Dave Bayley sang laying on the floor on top of a pool floaty while the floor of the stage looked like a pool. Another favorite part was during the band’s set Heat Wave’s the stage turned into a zoom call with a bunch of fans singing the song.
Though a great show, the one thing I wish they would’ve incorporated the fans in real time - something I’ve seen in other artists live shows. There were also technical difficulties that had the chatroom down for a portion of the show which made it even harder to interact with fans like you would at a concert. Given the circumstances for 2020 these were just minor setbacks for something that is very new to us - online concerts have already come so far in quality from when things first shut down. I mean the band also did some things I haven’t seen any other band do in their live shows like show a QR Code fans could scan to see an AR version of the band members heads on a camera as well as have a maze fans could mess around with during the show.
With all that said, Glass Animals really made the best of the circumstances. I can only hope that the next time I see the band it’ll be live, but till then it’s a nice treat to get to experience live