Deviouz

Well, I felt like I missed out being on the hill, even though I was about 4 rows from the front. I personally wasn't feeling the proper vibe, I mean I was so envious because there were pretty weak cheers coming from our end and up front everyone would scream for twice as long.

Some of the people around me pissed me off too, ie. one guy just kept yammering away, even during Wings (!!!!), kept saying the song was boring and how annoyed he was that Tool wasn't playing other songs etc. And other things along that line was what annoyed me most, the people around me weren't getting into the 10000 Days songs at all (except for Vicarious at the end), just made me want to tell them all that if they didn't bother to know the album very well then why the hell were they there.

I was particularly looking forward to Jambi, and someone up above said he loved it... but I just wasn't feeling it, there was no noise no nothing. It was death quiet, noone even cheered when they came to sit down for a break preparing for Wings. And maybe this is a bit immature, but I thought maybe at least if I was in general admission maybe a bit of moshing could add to the atmosphere, but we were way too far back for that.

Argh... anyway, now that I got all that out, I can't fault the band, they played absolutely unbelievable, and the last 45 minutes or whatever starting with Wings was probably the best I've ever seen in a concert thus far. The lasers were awesome. The visuals were also great, more high definition than I had expected, Rosetta was straight-up unreal. Lots of pretty cool seguing tracks all added up to make it feel real natural, and for the majority of the gig when I wasn't distracted it was just a great feeling being able to be so connected to the music, that's how awesome the amphitheater was.

So yeah, only complaint I had was I felt embarrassed about the crowd, (and the guy up top? What a douchebag!), Maynard didn't even need to say Sydney was louder, to me it was just immediately apparently this Melbourne crowd at least was pretty lame.

EDIT: I forgot to say anything about Lateralus. BEST. LIVE. SONG. EVER. It's like they've played it so many times live now, it just embodies perfection now. So good.

Oh yeah, Art, you pushed your way through me you sonofabitch :-) You were like two rows in front of me.