Aqua at the Orpheum

Early this month I got a message from a friend: “Totally forgot I got a ticket to Aqua for you”. I knew the concert was sometime soon, but I hadn’t thought about it since she asked if I wanted to go last spring. It was six o’clock, and the concert was at eight.

Oh.

Fortunately, I can get downtown pretty quickly. We met up for food, then went to the Orpheum to see the show.

The opening act was Bran Van Elektrio. It took me a minute to realize this was a striped-down version of Bran Van 3000: There was the main guy from BV3K, a woman singer/rapper, and another guy on guitar and keyboards. They played “Drinking in LA”, of course, and some other songs from their first few albums. It was awesome, and I kinda wish I’d checked their merch table.

Then Aqua! It was the first show of their Canadian tour, and they were clearly blown away by their reception. They kept to the hits, playing pretty much their entire first album, and some of their later songs. The crowd was standing for pretty much the entire show, other than a soft ballad in the middle that gave the band (and the audience) some time to recoup their energy.

It was a great show. My only quibble is that they had some projected backgrounds, and it was all AI-generated. They looked cool, but everything had that weird AI vibe, and it was a little disappointing that they skimped on the visuals.

Pictures:

You can see René in total hype man mode, while Lene sings.

The most obviously AI backdrop. Look at the numbers on those phones. Yes, giant melting rotary telephones floating in a neon city should look fake, but still. Bah.

Lene getting funky on stage while René raps (?) off camera.

They got up to talk to the audience at the ending (before the encore, of course). They were emotional. So were we.

EDIT: Apparently I uploaded a video of them performing “Cartoon Heroes”. Enjoy!