by Michael McCarthy
Last Friday night I saw Vain at Taffeta in Lowell, Massachusetts. Vain is one of my favorite bands of the genre and has been since their debut No Respect came out way back in the day. When they basically vanished from releasing music in most of the world, I always bought their Japanese imports and loved them all. I even loved the Fade album that they released during the grunge era.
Since they never made it as big as bands like Skid Row and BulletBoys and some of their albums weren’t released in the United States when they came out, I’d never had the opportunity to see Vain live before and I’d always really wanted to see them. I couldn’t believe it when Spotify e-mailed me and told me they were playing the city that my small town borders here in Massachusetts. You can bash Spotify all you want, but if it wasn’t for that e-mail from Spotify I never would have heard about that show so I kind of see Spotify in a more positive light now because of that.
So, how were they? Fantastic. Truly. Now, Davy Vain was the only guy from the band whose name I ever really knew because they weren’t as big as a lot of other bands from the genre whose members’ names became common knowledge. To that end, I am not sure if anyone else in the band is from the original line up or if Davy Vain is the only original member. But either way, they sounded fantastic. Honestly, I thought they sounded as great live as they do on their albums.
I just have one small complaint. They only played 12 songs. You can see the set list via the l ink below. At least 8 of the songs were from the No Respect album. I guess that makes sense since that was their only fairly popular album in the U.S. but I really can’t fathom why they only played 12 songs when they were the headlining act and tickets cost 40 dollars. My best guess is that they’re not in the middle of a big tour and only played a music festival recently so they probably just did the same set that they did at the festival, perhaps because those were the only songs that the band had submitted to memory, which would make sense if Davy was the only original member.
I’m disabled and can’t stand for long periods of time so I was sitting in the area of the sound booth in the back of the club, but it looked to me like one of the guitarists was female, which I thought was pretty cool.
I don’t know how this show came about. I mean, if they’re not doing a regular tour right now, I just can’t fathom how they would have come to play a gig in Lowell, Massachusetts of all places. If they were just doing one off shows you’d expect them to play in L.A. or New York City or something, not a smaller city in Massachusetts like Lowell. I’m quite happy that they did this show, of course, I just can’t quite wrap my head around why they played here of all places. If anyone knows, do tell…
https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/vain/2024/taffeta-lowell-ma-73543ea9.html
Leave a Reply