Promising a celebration of “forty years of magical songs”, legendary post-punk outfit Echo & the Bunnymen cut across America on a tour crafted to showcase the songs that have most powerfully left their mark on the collective musical psyche. Original members Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant lead a six-piece ensemble that brings the tunes to life, and with more than a dozen studio albums – and a total number of releases that more than doubles that when considering other discs – there are ample entry points where people may have discovered the band’s music over the decades. The Bunnymen’s Wednesday-evening appearance at Boston’s House of Blues serves as a whirlwind tour through many of those, including some unexpected covers mixed in.
The early portion of the night favors their earliest album, 1980s Crocodiles, featuring ‘Going Up’, ‘All That Jazz’, and ‘Rescue’ within the first four songs. While the night hasn’t been arranged chronologically, starting at the beginning feels like a fitting foundation for a comprehensive tour such as this. During a pause between songs, McCulloch encourages everyone to sing along during the choruses, and during ‘Bring On the Dancing Horses’ he relaxes and lets the crowd completely take over for a stretch. ‘All My Colours’, led by a solitary drum beat, contrasts with the iconic, sweeping ‘Seven Seas’, a classic even among classics. McCulloch’s vocal rings out bright as ever, just like the tolling sounds that carry the verse into the chorus. During the final refrain, he once again allows the crowd to sing unaccompanied, their collective voice filling the main hall.
Historically in favor of covers both in the studio and live settings, the band mixes their own ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ with the onomatopoetic chorus of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. That gives way to the funky ‘Bedbugs and Ballyhoo’, then ‘Villiers Terrace’ finds itself morphing midway through into a cover of The Doors’ ‘Roadhouse Blues’, gliding effortlessly between McCulloch and Sergeant’s creation and their influences, an admiration that clearly runs deep as they also cover ‘People Are Strange’ a few songs later in the evening as the penultimate song of the main set.
Approaching that conclusion, some of the band’s most lauded work starts to appear, including ‘Over the Wall’. Making use of stereo sound better than almost any other song of its time, the way the restrained opening verse circles the listener’s ears and then explodes into guitar and drums divided between left and right, each of those elements comes together in a fantastic synthesis. The song’s middle features an intense cascade of drums and another nod to a fellow artist, this time with McCulloch distorting the once-ubiquitous ‘Runaway’ by Del Shannon. The frantic drum rhythm never ceases until the song’s end, carrying it to its temporal limit.
There were a few candidates one might pick for the duty of closing the main set, and for this tour Echo & the Bunnymen have opted for ‘The Cutter’. Featuring a bouncing bassline juxtaposed with fittingly jagged stabs of guitar from Sergeant, McCulloch stands tall for the lengthy held notes that presage each chorus, and alongside an iconic grouping of drum triplets signals the crowd once again to sing during the second refrain. Then the song drops into its cinematic conclusion, the blend of keys and guitar that soar from its bridge to its conclusion are suitably triumphant to send the band off for a quick respite. That break ends with a lengthy variation of ‘Lips Like Sugar’, after which they duck out of sight and reemerge one final time.
“It’s been said by many people that this is the greatest song ever written,” McCulloch says of the next track. While the night has already been full of so many notable cuts, there’s one that stands above even those for most fans of the Bunnymen: ‘The Killing Moon’. It’s fitting that the band and their team opted for the word “magical” to describe this tour and the band’s discography, as their oeuvre undoubtedly possesses a kind of gothic surrealism that has contributed to its longevity. ‘The Killing Moon’ is the apex of that notion, an impressionistically-rendered opus that balances the ominousness and beauty of the “fate” McCulloch lyrically invokes.
To end the night, the band closes with the final song off of Ocean Rain: the album’s title track. Like the prior piece, it too sails a line of longitude between the profound sadness of its words and the gorgeousness of its instrumental. The one subtle shift of “the waves” to “your waves” in that final verse tells as much of the tale as the rest of the song – just one exemplar of the ingenuity that has unfailingly kept the music of Echo & the Bunnymen so captivating through all these years.
Review and photos by Collin Heroux
