This year, the Boca staff attended more concerts than any other calendar year, providing our staff plenty of stiff competition from which to choose. Here are 10 performances that stuck with us the most.
10. The War on Drugs at Fillmore Miami Beach
The dream-folk project led by frontman Adam Granduciel brought a genuine production to Miami: Diffuse beams of light sliced through an atmospheric haze, while a series of identical abstract panels spread out behind the band like concave dominoes, shifting colors when appropriate. Yet the group betrayed its humble, lower-fi origins in its workmanlike performance, which eschewed rock-star bombast. “Under the Pressure” was a visceral knockout, a song that meandered toward a hypnotic void before jolting us back to consciousness, like a lion woken from slumber.
9. The Mountain Goats at Culture Room
Flanked by the grizzly and gifted multi-instrumentalist Matthew Douglas and longtime bassist Peter Hughes, with drummer Jon Wurster at his perch in the back, Mountain Goats singer-songwriter John Darnielle was characteristically loquacious and in great spirits, despite a few technical hiccups during the show. We were repaid with a satisfyingly eclectic set that showcased rock ‘n’ roll barnburners, spartan piano ballads and even a front-porch jamboree-style cover of Little Feat’s “Willin’.” “Stabbed to Death Outside San Juan” was as intensely performed as any Mountain Goats song I’ve ever heard live, a harrowing amalgam of spoken-word narrative, pounding drums, and Douglas’ complex saxophone chords, played like a guitar.
8. Idina Menzel at Mizner Park Amphitheater
The star of stage and screen musicals from “Rent” and “Wicked” to “Frozen” has maintained a consistent vigor as a live performer. With her big voice and bold stage presence, Menzel knows how to captivate an audience—and that is just what she did when she took the stage in Boca. A 15-piece orchestra backed Menzel, led by pianist Cliff Carter, and from the first song, you could tell that the beautiful orchestrations would easily enhance her voice. From theater classics like Cole Porter’s “Love For Sale” and a medley of Ethel Merman songs to Radiohead’s “Creep,” Joni Mitchell’s “River” and The Police’s “Roxanne,” nothing was off limits; “Creep” let her express how she feels on days when she doesn’t want to get out of bed, and she even performed part of it lying flat on the stage, earning her a standing ovation.
7. The Violent Femmes at Sunset Cove Amphitheater
For such a short set (opening for Barenaked Ladies), the Femmes unveiled a deep trove of instrumental color, not limited to mandolin, harmonica, xylophone and even the giant contrabass sax, and punctuated “Black Girls” with a mini, dueling-percussion symphony. Drawing largely from the band’s first two seminal LPs, the classics kept coming, at a dancier clip than their album versions. The Femmes closed, as always, with “Add It Up,” the audience chanting along to the a cappella opening like inspired congregants at the Church of Gano. The energy at the amphitheater was electric and, frankly, unforgettable during this all-too-brief performance, and the crowd offered plenty of motivation for the Femmes to return for a future headlining tour.
6. Mark Knopfler at Broward Center
The former Dire Straits guitar god and his exceptional seven-piece band delivered an evening of exquisite musical storytelling that visited different eras without overstaying the welcome. The backing band, which included former Dire Straits keyboardist and longtime Knopfler collaborator Guy Fletcher, was a show unto itself, incorporating everything from the cittern to the uilleann pipes. But Knopfler drew more than enough mesmerizing sounds from his Stratocaster to remind us why he’s considered one of the great finger-pickers in rock history. Though clearly hoping to hear more of their favorite Dire Straits songs, the wildly enthusiastic Halloween night audience had Knopfler’s back all night long.
5. The Jesus and Mary Chain at Olympia Theatre
It took about a minute into The Jesus & Mary Chain’s set at the Olympia Theater for the legendary venue’s opulent, filigreed interiors to disappear: This wasn’t a dignified concert in an historic opera house; it was a rock show in a dim dive in an underground club in New York or London or Glasgow circa 1985. Touring to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the band’s noise-pop benchmark “Psychocandy,” the group played expertly, capturing all the discordant nuance and eardrum-busting fire of the legendary album to the appreciation of a largely older, dancy crowd unburdened by hipster affect. The sound mix possessed all of the honeyed texture, metal-on-metal clangor, and partially buried vocals of J&MC’s recorded music, only with a more tactile urgency.
4. Taylor Swift at AmericanAirlines Arena
Swift’s concert was far more than a recounting of her biggest hits—it was a carefully calculated and theatrically thoughtful experience that was well worth the two hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic and parking garage havoc we endured on the way there. Intermittent video episodes of Taylor’s repertoire of impressively famous best friends speaking candidly about the pop star allowed just enough time for her to change from one glittery two-piece outfit to the next. And when Selena Gomez, Lena Dunham, Karlie Kloss and Cara Delevingne weren’t mentioning their thoughts about love or Swift’s cat obsession, backup dancers were keeping the crowd alive with routines including LED-lit umbrellas, doors on wheels and scaffold-like structures. But perhaps the vinyl LED bracelets each audience member found attached to their seats were the most engaging element of last night’s production. They lit up stadium-wide to set a mood that coincided with whatever song Taylor was performing.
3. My Morning Jacket at Fillmore Miami Beach
Starting with the rousing and rollicking blast-off of “Circuital,” My Morning Jacket sank its hooks and riffs into the crowd and took them on a mid-summer rock ride that easily qualifies as one of the best concerts of the year. Supporting its first album in four years, the exceptional “The Waterfall,” the band took the stage just before 10 p.m. and held the Fillmore in its grasp until 10 past midnight, with several of the evening’s 21 songs bleeding into the next. Jim James’ five-piece band delivered a rich, borderline-spiritual musical journey filled with lush harmonies, ethereal guitar work, pulse-pounding power jams and, on songs like “Victory Dance” and “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Part II,” James’ haunting, uplifting howls. When James and company finally shut it down after a roof-raising version of “Gideon” that capped a relentless two-hour, 15-minute performance, the electrified crowd was still buzzing.
2. SunFest
This year featured the best SunFest lineup of any year in recent memory, from Fall Out Boy and Lenny Kravitz to Matisyahu and Lindsey Stirling. Co-headliner Hozier carried an audience of thousands, packed as the far as the eye could see, through nearly every track on his self-titled debut and then some; The Pixies captured everyone’s mid-afternoon attention with a blistering 75-minute, 23-song set that included a string of vintage hits in rapid succession as well as a selection of ear-bleeding deeper cuts; and Wilco exceeded its allotted set time, taking us all the way to two hours and more than 25 songs generously plucked from its eight studio albums and its three-volume Woody Guthrie project, along with a smattering of obscure cuts and, most surprisingly, a gem from Uncle Tupelo, Jeff Tweedy’s legendary pre-Wilco band.
1. Kraftwerk at Olympia Theatre
The perennially relevant electronic pioneers brought the first 3D concert I’ve ever seen to this historic Miami venue. While today’s 3D is used mainly for depth-of-field realism, Kraftwerk rediscovered the in-your-face novelty that made the technology so awe-inspiring in the first place. The animation changed with each career-spanning song, running the gamut from abstract lines and color spectrums to literal representations of the lyrics. The minimalist highway anthem “Autobahn” was simply entrancing, an elegant epic that integrated everything from videogame graphics from a driver’s point of view to images of lane dividers swishing past in a blur to musical notes floating from the car’s speakers like balloons. Through it all, Ralf Hutter, Fritz Hilpert, Henning Schmitz and Falk Grieffenhagen stood like sentinels at lighted podiums, uniformly dressed like futuristic convicts, pushing buttons and turning knobs on their synthesizers with Teutonic precision. The seeming simplicity of their performance belied the care and effort that went into producing such an extraordinary audiovisual marriage.
