Bob Mould - 2020 01 12 Gateway City Arts, Holyoke, MA

Show note:
Someone sent me an untracked version of this show. Sound wandered a little bit, so I adjusted both channels in sections to even things out.  I think it is the same version that is posted here: https://livemusicnewsandreview.com/2020/01/bob-mould-hits-holyoke-ma/ - Anyhow, interesting to early versions of Blue Hearts songs.

1 intro
2 The War
3 Flip Your Wig [Hüsker Dü]
4 I Apologize [Hüsker Dü]
5 Hover Dam [Sugar]
6 Stand Guard
7 See A Little Light
8 Celebrated Summer [Hüsker Dü]
9 The Descent
10 You Say You
11 Thirty Dozen Roses 
12 Heart on My Sleeve
13 Next Generation
14 Forecast of Rain
15 Everything To You
16 Sunshine Rock
17 Hey Mr. Grey
18 If I Can't Change Your Mind [Sugar]
19 Hardly Getting Over It [Hüsker Dü]
20 Something I Learned Today [Hüsker Dü]
21 Chartered Trips [Hüsker Dü]

Opener:
Will Johnson

Lineage: Audience Master > Digital Audio Recorder > WAV > SoundForge (levels) > CDWAVE (splits) > FLAC

Review from: https://livemusicnewsandreview.com/2020/01/bob-mould-hits-holyoke-ma/

After a short break Bob Mould came out, turned on the amp, and a wave of volume, of sheer LOUD, came off of the stage. He walked to the mic and said “How’s everybody out there? Is the guitar loud enough?” I mean, yes- it was very loud.

Mould immediately fired into one song after another spanning his four decade career with material from Husker Du, Sugar, and songs he seems to have just written yesterday. They are more than simple three chord songs but are played as if they are basic rockers. Fingers flying over the fretboard from power chords to unique triads, and even some walking leads that bridged from one chord to another rang with both distortion and clarity.

His voice is as clear and melodic as ever. He somehow packs an enormous amount of anger and rage into his singing without going past the tipping point. He is melodic in the way that Mike Doughty is melodic, clear as a bell and extremely sing-able. Most of the songs fell into the two and half to four minute, and oftentimes Mould would go right from one song to another. I recognized a few songs through the assault.

This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it, I did. It was just difficult to decipher the lyrics and to pick out the beauty in the melody and guitar accompaniment because of the sheer intensity of the aural attack. This is true to form, and what I expected- I’m not complaining about it at all.

One of the unique aspects of this show is how little Mould changes his act as a solo artist compared to being in a band. In fact, I don’t know that he did anything different at all (and he is not required to, of course!) He told a single story about a rough fan interaction that made national news the week prior (from his Fall River MA show, involving politics.) Other than that he addressed the crowd very little, with a couple of How’s It Going? exclamations. We were close enough that at one point we overheard him self muttering “I wish I had something to say.”

Mould is clearly a genius of his genre, and his fans can still get huge doses of his outlook and sound at his shows, decades after he changed rock and roll. His pop sensibility applied to an alternative rock motif that had yet to be born when he was carving out his particular sound is uniquely his own though emulated by many.