This is going to be pretty quick⁠—for more background, you can read my writeup of attending the first date on Poppy’s previous tour.  I was supposed to see her again in November with Ellie up in Portland, but Poppy canceled that tour due to the covids, and the replacement 2022 version cut out the Portland stop.  I might not have gone by myself to the Bay Area stop had it been in San Francisco again, but, c’mon, Poppy was playing Berkeley.  I’m not going to miss seeing my favorite musician of all time when she’s appearing within walking distance of my house.

That said, I don’t think Ellie missed much.  I have no idea what the Portland venue would have been like, but the UC Theatre didn’t have seats available for people with general admission tickets, and being stuck down with the crowd was suboptimal.  I had to move around a bit to dodge thick clouds of this and that.  Views of the stage were okay, and the vocals were significantly higher in the mix than in SF, but the guitars were lower, and so several songs’ big hooks were kind of lost in the mud.  I was pleased to see that the awesome Ralph Alexander was still play­ing drums, and Ted Gowans was still on keyboards, but I didn’t recognize the guitarist or bassist: apparently they were Ricky Tillo and Nick Beard, respectively.  The opening act was some rapper.  All rap I hate.  I actually found myself pining to have Vowws back.

Here was the setlist:

• “Lessen the Damage”:  A great song from 2021, and a very high-energy number to kick things off, but it doesn’t necessarily feel like an opener to me.

• “X”:  Dating back to 2018, this was the oldest song played at this show.  Not one of my favorites.

• “Scary Mask”:  Another relative oldie.

• “Bloodmoney”:  The one that earned Poppy a Grammy nomination, so I guess she had to include it, though as I noted in my previous writeup, it loses something live.

• “Concrete”:  The third straight song from 2019.

• “Sit/Stay”:  I mean, I do love these songs, but this was the fifth straight song that I had already heard on the previous tour back in the Before Times, and I really wanted to hear the 2021 stuff.

• “Flux”:  Now that’s more like it!  The opening track from the latest album.  Probably should have been the opening track to the concert.

• “All the Things She Said”:  This cover was the big surprise at the previous Poppy concert I had gone to.  If she was going to throw one of her recent covers into the setlist, I would have preferred “Fear of Dying”.

• “Her”:  Poppy played guitar on this one!  As the best track from her latest album, this was automatically a highlight, though I did notice that during the double-tracked bridge, she only sang the low part and let a recording handle the high notes that put the song into my pantheon.  Fair enough, I guess⁠—she’s got a lot of shows left to save her voice for.

• “Breeders”:  An even better 2021 song, off the Eat EP.

• “Stagger”:  A new song, apparently due to be released after the tour, in the same vein as her recent shoegazey stuff.  I thought this might be called “Backwards” based on the lyrics, but the internets tell me otherwise.

• “Cue”:  Poppy tried to get the crowd to supply the “Cue!” chant that runs through this song.  It didn’t work out.

• “Anything Like Me”:  Back to 2020, but after four songs I hadn’t heard on the previous tour, that was fine.

• “Hysteria”:  My least favorite song from the latest album, but I do still like it, and it worked well live.

• “As Strange as It Seems”:  The shoegaziest song of Poppy’s shoegaze period so far, it made the crowd do some stupid swaying-arms thing.

• “Never Find My Place”:  The closing track of the latest album and of this set, prior to the encore.  As for that encore⁠—it was the same as in 2020, just with the songs flip-flopped!  That is:

• “I Disagree”:  This song really suffered from having its central guitar riff lost in the mix.  Unfortunate.

• “Bite Your Teeth”:  Good song, but not a great closer.  I had been hoping for “Dark Dark World”, the last track of the Eat EP and currently my second-favorite song of all time after “Open Season” by Die Mannequin, but no such luck.

And yeah, in addition to “Dark Dark World”, notable omissions included “So Mean” (the latest single, though I didn’t miss it) and “Eat” (which I very much did miss), and from the older stuff, “Fill the Crown” (maybe because of the way that, live, it relied heavily on a pre-recorded vocal track) and “Don’t Go Outside” (supplanted by “Never Find My Place”, I guess).  And of course all of the great songs from before “X”, from “Time Is Up” to “Metal” to “Everybody Wants to Be Poppy”, have been consigned to the memory hole.  And while, as noted, I don’t think Ellie missed a life-changing experience by having her locale axed from the tour schedule, it was nice to see the rescheduled Bay Area date actually stick this time⁠—it felt like we might finally be emerging from dystopia.  Though really it feels more like we’re just trading one dystopia for another: after all, Poppy is currently scheduled to play Moscow on July 9 and Kyiv on July 11, and I have my suspicions that those dates may find themselves next on the chopping block.

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