In an almost last minute fashion, I was able to find Mary a ticket to the sold out Tea Party show at Town Ballroom, making this feel like college. Eric, Mary and I attending a Tea Party show in Buffalo again! Roxy had an extra, so Mary snatched it up, and we were really only missing Danielle and Adrienne to make it really seem like we were young again haha.
Forgetting that we were old and that the Tea Party always has crappy openers and goes on too late, we got there far too early, but made the most of it. We hung out at one of the inside bars until Roxy took us to her secret in front section right before they came on. Score for not waiting at the barrier for 2 and a half hours but still being right in front, albeit on the far left side, in front of the speaker stacks, in front of Stuart. It was a different perspective than we were used to after all these years (this was my 16th Tea show, somehow I surpassed Eric, it was his 15th).
I was going to look at the setlists for this little Canadian and 1 US show tour (score one for Buffalo! The only sold out show, and sold out for a month and a half! They could, and should, play 2 dates here), but I kept forgetting, maybe intentionally because I didn’t want to see that it was the same old setlist with new songs added. And in the end, that’s what it was. But again, like I keep saying…we bitch about this standard set list, and when it’s done, they put on such a great show, and always sound so good, that we forgive them. The new songs sounded pretty good, even if they didn’t necessarily play the ones I really wanted to hear, like Submission. The Black Sea was rocking, The Ocean at the End which is pretty long and epic translated well live. What we did get that was sorta new was a whole 30 seconds of Transmission inserted into Temptation, and a whole 30 seconds of Pulse inserted into…Sister Awake. And that’s about all we’ll ever see of those songs at the rate this band is going lol. They took out Halcyon Days to fit in new songs, which makes me a bit sad, but we also only had to suffer through one verse of The Messenger inserted into Save Me, so that’s a bonus. Psychopomp, highlight as always.
This is the setlist from Montreal but it looks accurate. Jeff Martin did a bit of Little Drummer Boy in Save Me…and a few lines of something else Christmasy in another, before something in the encore.
The LoC
The Bazaar
The Black Sea
Psychopomp
Fire in the Head
The 11th Hour (with Halcyon Days intro)
Lullaby
Water’s On Fire/Release/Water’s On Fire
Save Me/The Messenger/Kashmir/Save Me
The Ocean at the End
Temptation/Transmission/Temptation
Encore:
Heaven’s Coming Down/All Along the Watchtower/Heaven’s Coming Down
Encore 2:
Winter Solstice
Sister Awake/Pulse/Sister Awake
It looks like a short setlist, but they played for 2 hours. We tried to think of what else from the “standard set list” got cut to make way for the new songs, and I could only think of “Sun Going Down” and full versions of “Release”, “Halcyon Days” and “the Messenger”. Maybe that’s it. I’m happy we didn’t get “The Maker” lol. “The 11th Hour” had only been done a few times, so perhaps if they do a summer tour we’ll get a few more new songs. (Oh they took out “Writing’s on the Wall” too which is A-ok with me.)