Today The Cranberries are playing at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Roma for the 3rd and last show in beautiful Italy. Italians fans do love The Cranberries & there is no doubt The Cranberries do love Italy. The whole band arrived in Roma yesterday and had a day off there after 2 great shows in Padova and Milano.
Roma is the 11th show of a tour that counts 33 shows, meaning one third of the European Leg of the Roses Tour 2012 has now been played which enabled fans to notice a regular pattern in setlists change from one night to another. Besides the London show which was the premiere (and a premiere is never too representative) one can identify 2 setlists, the first one starting with “Just My Imagination” and the other one with “Analyse”.
These 2 setlist greatly differ in terms of dynamic and of length. If the Analyse set contains 25 or 26 songs, only 20 or 21 songs are featured in the other set!
As a consequence, don’t be too surprised if ever you get to read really good reviews (from the media, we’re not speaking about fans here) from a concert whereas that on the following evening tends to contrast.
If some fans do identify the setlists by speaking of the “energetic & long” one and the “slow and short” one, we, meaning Cranberries World, do not think things are this black and white.
Having seen a couple of shows, we can say both shows feature amazing and rare songs as well as beautiful moments. What stroke us the most was mainly the discrepancy in terms of song number.
Things are not frozen though, the running order is never exactly the same and some old rarities do pop up surprisingly sometimes to our greatest delight. Plus consider there are still a lot of dates to come, the band can always refine its choices at all times.
The Cranberries are in great shape and appear to be still amazing performers. The 3 boys play goddamn well and the still blond Dolores changes her clothes 3 times a show, most of the time for beautiful dresses exclusively on this tour. Dolores’ vocal cord nodule seems to be an old story now as her voice has been particularly good since the beginning of the tour. One may note Russell Burton’s amazing performance on keyboard on the “Interlude” which is an instrumental version of “Shattered” as well as Johanna Cranitch’s (recently hired this year) great back vocals. The Roses Tour is thus going pretty well!
Finally, let’s just mention briefly the topic we’ve been trying to avoid for a while as we don’t want to turn into a tabloid website 😉
Doubt is raising among the fans and people start gossiping about it, so here we go: whether or not our favourite singer has had breast surgery recently, this we do not know, but it does look like her breast’s bigger now when looking at random close up pictures. Keep in mind it does not necessarily imply surgery though, who knows if this is not just all about getting older, gaining a little weight or whatever…
Anyways!
Happy Halloween everyone, and let’s see if the band will surprise us tonight on this special evening as mentioned on an Italian article. (article no longer available)
