Twenty One Pilots Electrify Moline With Brilliant Bombast
The biggest American band on the planet right now crashed into Moline Sunday night.
Since they showed up on the pop culture radar screen, Twenty One Pilots have been lofted to the airy realm of superstars by their fans, shot down by their haters, alternately loved and loathed by critics but continue to soar high. They were the biggest band of 2016 by any count and anyone objectively watching the show Sunday night could see why, as to the rabid adoration of a packed house of 11,000 fans, they electrified the sold out crowd with a terrific two hours of brilliant, genre-bending emo pop rock.
My eight-year-old, and the radio, introduced me to the band last year, through their ubiquitous hits on constant rotation, and I liked all of them, they’re great pop songs.
But after seeing the band live, I can definitely say I’m a fan.
The show was fantastic and fiery, filled with brilliant bombast, cool costumes and lighting and stage effects and the sound and songs were dynamic and catchy, jammed with hooks and clicky wordplay girded by a quiet sincerity to the band that’s really low-key cool.
The crowd was one of the most diverse, particularly age-wise, that I’d seen at a show in a while. I took my eight-year-old, Jackson, who was going to see his first “real” concert that he’d gotten to pick out, rather than one he accompanied his Dad to see. And I could see he wasn’t alone in experiencing his first true concert. The arena was full of kids pre-teen and younger accompanied by their parents, along with plenty of teens and twentysomethings. It was a decidedly young-skewing crowd, but also one of the best behaved and integrated audiences I’ve experienced in a while as well. From beginning to end, EVERY song, not just the hits, was accompanied by squeals of recognition upon its opening notes and sung along to by the masses. Usually in any show there’s a lull when the band digs deep into its back catalog or album cuts, but not this time. The crowd was with them from note one and stayed until the final coda. It was wonderful to see and experience, and all the more impressive was the sincerity and effort put forth by the band to earn that devotion.
The duo of multi-instrumentalist and singer Tyler Joseph and percussionist Josh Dun was all in from the start, leaping about the stage, into the crowd and into every single one of their songs. There were no duds, no down time, it was all in, all out, and it was an awesome time.
One of my favorite stretches of the show was when the band emerged amidst the floor crowd on their second stage to run through a few hits from their back catalog. Most of their pre-megastardom material is the kind of cool, ultra-hooky kind of stuff that fits right in on their label, Fueled By Ramen, and it’s the kind of quirky emo pop rock I love, along the lines of acts like Something Corporate, Cute Is What We Aim For and bigger lights like Panic at the Disco and the ubiquitous Fall Out Boy. But like all of their tunes, the early stuff has the spark of creative vibrancy that resonated with the masses so quickly. And so it was cool to see them run through the early stuff, particularly the sprawling, irresistible “Ode To Sleep,” which, like its official video, was preceded and accompanied by vintage footage of the duo on their rise from basement band playing at VFW halls to arena darlings.
The group bopped and bounced about to the reggae roots roll of “Ride” as fans sang waves of words surfing along the sweet chorus. The same accompaniment soared with the anthemic “Heathens” and the disjointed, melancholy nostalgia of the existentialist smash “Stressed Out.”
Fans roared right along with “Fairly Local” and on the electro-emo-rock-pop “Car Radio” the crowd was whipped into a massive frenzy, thousands bouncing along and singing in time with the throbbing dance beat, strobing lights and raucous rave atmosphere.
Throughout, the art direction and staging of the show was fantastic. As expected, the band were clad in various striking masks and outfits throughout, everything from the opening salvo of red skinny coats and dark black jeans and skinny ties to go along with ebony masks to a post-apocalyptic bit where Josh was accompanied by drummers in hazmat suits and more. The group was flanked on stage by a massive screen that blared with frenzied graphics of skulls and patterns and cooed with the slow lava-lamp psychedelica of flying birds and ornate sugar dolls, abstract art and vintage video.
At one point, Dun had a fun drum battle with a massive video projection of himself, that was literally mind-blowing. At another, the group was lofted on platforms above the mosh pit on the floor. And at yet another, they rolled across the tops of the floor crowd encased in giant red balloons. At various points, Joseph would pop up in the midst of the crowd, surprising fans and sending them into squeals of delight.
It was dramatic, it was over-the-top, it was a SHOW.
And that’s what you want to see.
At least that’s what I want to see when I go to a concert.
And my son, and the various other kids and teens in the crowd, definitely agreed, if the herculean jet takeoff sound of crowd ardor that filled the arena throughout is any indication.
Who knows what the future holds for Twenty One Pilots? They’re massive now. But bands come and go, and ten years from now a lot of the kids in this crowd could be looking back and reminiscing, just as the band does in “Stressed Out,” on the good old days, and a first concert in Moline.
And when they do, they’ll be able to say it was awesome, and so was the band.
Whatever the future for Twenty One Pilots, that’s definitely a present, and a legacy, of which they can be proud.
