Several months ago my friend Bob texted me that he had bought some tickets to the Glass Animals‘ “Tour of Earth” show coming to Raleigh and asked if we wanted to go.

Bob was also responsible, indirectly, for me becoming a fan of Glass Animals. He likes to go to music festivals, and back in 2017 he invited us to go to Lollapalooza in Chicago. I caught the Glass Animals set and really liked their music. They were promoting their second album “How to Be a Human Being” and, while I listen to musically digitally these days if it had been a vinyl record I would have worn that sucker out.

They are now touring to promote their fourth studio album, “I Love You So F***ing Much“.

Where I live in North Carolina there are a couple of large venues that host musical acts, and Glass Animals was preforming at Walnut Creek Amphitheater, which is the only major outdoor venue. It’s located just southeast of Raleigh and consists of covered, reserved seating area and a large, sloped lawn for general admission. Note that it is now called the “Coastal Credit Union Music Park” (it has been a number of other names as well) and I’m certain it will change names again before I return so I’ll just call it “Walnut Creek”.

Bob had purchased lawn seats for this show. Now I enjoy lawn seats if the weather is nice, but once I worked for a company that bought season “gold circle” seats and that spoiled me. Those seats were on a raised area close to the stage, and you sat at a small table and had wait staff service. Needless to say I can’t afford those tickets on my own.

On the day of the show I really, really didn’t want to go. Our lives are very busy at the moment and all I wanted to do was curl up and take a nap lasting a day or two. It’s a 90 minute drive to Bob’s house so we had to add a three hour commute on top of the trip to the show. Walnut Creek is not known for being easy to get into or out of, there is always the question of the weather, and I am also not a big fan of crowds. That said I’m very happy we went.

Four of us piled into Bob’s Tesla: Bob, his daughter Megan (who also went with us to Lolla), Andrea and myself. I was a pleasant surprise that getting into the venue wasn’t difficult, and once we parked it was about a five to ten minute walk to the gate. For a variety of reasons Walnut Creek limits what you can bring in, and all we took were some beach towels. We ended up not using them, since I am old I rented us some chairs, and we managed to plant ourselves center stage about in the middle of the lawn.

It turned out to be a beautiful evening, and we had an hour or so before the opening act so we just enjoyed it.

The show opened with Kevin Abstract, who is a rapper. He started off by doing about a 15 minute DJ set before launching into his show, and while I had not heard of him before he did a good job of getting the crowd ready for the main act.

Just a little after 9pm Glass Animals took the stage, which was set up as some sort of retro “mission control” room with a bank of monitors all in a row and a weird glass sphere in the center on which they would project images. All of the colors were strongly reminiscent of the early days of computers, when CGA graphics consisted of mainly magenta and cyan. The images projected on the large screen behind the stage recalled early vector graphics, and as an old it really appealed to me, although most of the attendees would have been decades away from birth when that was popular (I will say that there were a number of older people at the show and I didn’t feel like I was a chaperone).

The band is fronted by Dave Bayley, who is insanely energetic, and he started off with “whatthehellishappening?” off the new album.

Okay, I have to admit something. While I consider “How to Be a Human Being” one of my top ten favorite albums, I am less in love with their later work. Since they are out promoting “I Love You So F***ing Much” I figured they would spend a lot of time with those songs, and they did end up playing eight out of the ten tracks on that album (out of the seventeen songs in the set), but they managed to hit most of my favorites as well.

Off their first album they just played one song, “Gooey”, and when the song started Bayley had walked through the crowd and climbed up on some scaffolding. About halfway through he climbed down and was walking back to the stage when he stopped to talk to a young fan. He asked if the kid knew the words and when they replied “yes” he turned over the mic and let them finish the verse. I thought that was pretty cool.

The crowd was great. When the concert started I thought it was going to be lightly attended but by the time Glass Animals actually got on stage the place was packed. Although Bayley kept saying this was the largest and loudest crowd of the tour so far, I couldn’t tell if that was just crowd service or if he was telling the truth, but for the first time in awhile I was at a concert where I wasn’t bumped into by a drunk, people didn’t spend the whole show trying to record it on their phones, and all in all everyone was just cool and enjoying the music.

I mean, we had lasers

and at some point a big, shiny UFO thingie was lowered

Now they didn’t play my favorite track, “Season 2, Episode 3”, and they didn’t play “Cane Shuga”. I like the latter song but I really wanted to see them perform it live since I am certain they looped the vocals and it would be impossible to perform live (hence, I assume, its absence), but I did get “Life Itself”, and “Tokyo Drifting” and “Pork Soda”.

The last two closed the show, but they did a two song encore with “The Other Side of Paradise” and lastly the hit “Heat Waves”. “Heat Waves” is a song I always associate with the COVID pandemic, as the video shows Bayley collecting video monitors in a wagon and dragging them down a deserted street to an empty theatre. He sets them up on stage and images of the other three band members appear to close out the song.

All in all I got half the tracks from my favorite album and favorite tracks from the other two as well, and I am starting to appreciate the fourth album. I am extremely happy I went, and if you have the chance to catch them live I highly recommend it.