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Dead & Company Prove Las Vegas’ Sphere Isn’t Just for U2, but Them, Too, in Residency’s Astounding Opening Night: Concert Review
Dead & Company's Sphere residency in Vegas is a perfect marriage of expansive music and expansive visuals: it's trippy, overstimulating and sweet.
A highlight that will almost certainly be a nightly feature, however else the setlist may experience total turnover, is the visual sequence that accompanies Mickey Hart’s traditional mid-act-2 “Drums”/”Space” percussion quasi-solo (now augmented by Jay Lane as the second drummer in place of the apparently now-retired Bill Kreutzmann). This section, in which the rest of the band takes six, lasted 16 minutes during Thursday’s show, and not a second of that was wasted visually, starting with a phalanx of hundreds of animated percussion instruments that made rare use of Sphere’s “ceiling” as well as every other square foot. What we do know is that just about every choice made for Dead & Company felt just right — not doing anything to detract from the jazz interplay of the band members at their expansive best, but hardly lazy about giving periodic wakeup calls to an audience that came to Sphere not just to lounge, but to thrill-seek.
Or read this on Variety
