Phoenix, once again, took over the Hearst Greek Theater in Berkeley, CA for their Alpha Zulu Tour and brought along some great talent to join them. With two upbeat, party bands opening up for them, the crowd was pumped and ready to jam even harder in time for Phoenix to make their entrance.

The first band to take the stage were New York natives, Porches, who I hadn’t realized I was familiar with until I saw their set. They seemed to make quite an impression on those who weren’t familiar with their music at all. One of the many joys of attending shows with unfamiliar openers. Unfortunately a late entrance on my end left me with only few songs of theirs to enjoy.

Cut Copy

Next Australian Synth-Pop band, Cut Copy made their entrance and turned it into what felt like their headlining show. They were able to get the crowd up and dancing and even brought along a bit of production lights to their set that made it feel like we were at a dance club.

Cut Copy

If you’ve never attended a Phoenix show, the this is your sign to put that on your to-do list and head to the nearest show. The amount of detail in their production is insane. Every time I’ve attended one of their shows, I think there’s no way they can out do themselves and yet, I manage to be wrong every time. This time their stage set up consisted of multiple layered video screen frames that had a lot of intricate displays through out their set. It was as if the videos were helping them tell a story with each song. Lead man, Thomas Mars is one of my favorites to watch interact with fans during live shows. At the end of their encore, he jumped off the stage and headed into the crowd to greet fans one last time. Mars found that the easiest, fastest and definitely the most fun way to get back to the stage, was to crowd surf back.

You can catch details about any future shows by checking out their site.


Avatar

Natalie Baeza

Natalie is a photographer based out of the San Francisco Bay Area.