Yes, it's four days after the concert already, I can't believe it, because I've been stuck in a daydream since I walked out of that arena and even now I'm still jittering with excitement over the sheer - for lack of a better word - awesomeness that is L'Arc en Ciel.
I remember walking into the arena with a bag of swag - a photobook, poster, glow-stick - sporting a brand new L'arc t-shirt, and wondering if maybe I was too excited and that there were going to be more empty seats than I thought. Well, those fears were quickly squashed, because I think the seat in front of me may have been the only empty one there!
I wondered again that maybe I was the only American too, but there were plenty of people from everywhere: the girl next to me was Japanese, the boy behind me was Hispanic, and down on the floor I saw the group from Venezuela. Later, I found out that I wasn't even the only New Mexican to make the trip!
The crowd was primed to start cheering. Every time the welcome announcement played(probably about 4 times since I arrived), people would start screaming. And the show hadn't even started!
The show itself was like a long, beautiful dream you didn't want to wake from. Hyde, the lead singer, would egg on the audience and we would follow his lead, then he'd reward us with a kiss, or a smile, or a laugh. And we'd start all over again. Ken focused on the guitar and had a stupid little grin on his face the whole while. He later addressed the audience about his trip to the Museum of Natural History in English...grammatically correct but I'm not sure he knew exactly what he was saying. You could tell that he doesn't know English nearly as well as Hyde. Tetsuya surprised me with his sex jokes. "You want to eat my banana?" and he tossed bananas to the audience, one of which ended up in the camera booth, then again in the lighting booth(bad aim). "Do you want to lick my sucker?" And he tossed loli-pops into the audience. Yukihiro, the drummer, was in his own little world of rhythm, bashing away on the drums like there was no tomorrow and that was the only way he could communicate his feelings to the audience. Yuki didn't address the audience directly, but you could feel his intensity in his facial expression, his smile, laughs, his response to the audience's cheers - they seemed to simply light up his world. And he rewarded us with a pure metal drum solo(can you tell I'm biased yet?).
The set list was amazing. Sure, there were favorites that everyone wanted to hear that weren't played, but they only had 2 hours. I myself didn't get to hear my favorites - Kosou, New World, Hitomi no Juunin, Nexus 4, Heaven's Drive, Jiyuu e no Shoutai, Killing me(there's too many) - but I did hear my other favorites - Stay Away, Jojoushi, Driver's High, fate, Honey, My Heart Draws a Dream, Anata, and Niji.
They had a lot of interactive songs, ones which they requested audience participation, which certainly wasn't that hard to get, but really only possible if the fans knew the songs. Revelation involved us shouting out backups and "Hey!" at appropriate points; Driver's High had us screaming FLASH and CRASH while jack-hammering our glow-sticks in the air; My Heart Draws a Dream(the one I was waiting for) has a part at the end where we chanted the lyrics over and over while Hyde interspersed the song's name with his melodic taste; and for the encore, it started out with the monitors trying to get us to do the wave. We sucked at it. Nobody knows how to do the wave anymore. Then it moved on to us singing the chorus to Anata. Of course, they assumed we may not know the words so they provided them karaoke style: "mune ni itsu no hi ni mo kagayaku, anata ga iru kara, namida kare hatetemo taisetsu na, anata ga iru kara" We must have done that 20 times before they actually started the song.
When it was all done, they said goodbye and the stage went dark. Moment's later the lights came up and people started filing out. I considered trying to get a riot started to hear more, but I was literally exhausted from the screaming, jumping, glow-stick waving, jumping, jumping, jumping - it seems like I was jumping up and down the whole time like I was at some sort of rave. I hugged the Japanese girl who sat next to me - I didn't know her - and thanked her for being an awesome cheering buddy.
A final note, I wish my seats were closer. I wanted to be able to have floor seats, to be able to see the whole picture, look at all the members at once and see their faces while they played, and not just what the monitors were focused on at the time. The cameramen did a good job of capturing the experience, though, for those of us who were too far away. But now that it's over, I want to go back. I guess I'll just have to save up for a trip to Japan, because it's unlikely they'll be coming back soon. Or maybe they will. I'll just have to wait and see.
