LAS VEGAS — U2’s residency in Las Vegas, U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere, a 25-show run that kicked off Sept. 29 and was expected to wrap up on Dec. 16, has been extended with 11 more shows in January and February, 2024. It was the first event at the Sphere that was open to the general public. FRONT of HOUSE was there for the band’s second show on Sept. 30, and even if you closed your eyes and just listened, it was impressively immersive.
The sound system, which makes use of Holoplot’s proprietary beamforming technology, lived up to its promise by providing audio that was crisp, granularly detailed and full — but not excessively loud, with occasional flourishes including sonic movement within the space.
The venue’s powerful subwoofers, unleashed to the point of overkill during a few of the songs played by opening act DJ and percussionist Pauli “The PSM” Lovejoy, were mercifully reined in during most of U2’s show.
But there were other sonic quirks unique to the venue. Step just one foot outside the venue into the atrium area, and visitors will note, at times, completely different music.
The Whisper Test
At one point during the show, Bono played with the system with a whisper test, which was perfectly intelligible to everyone in the venue, even in the nosebleed section. And if you didn’t mind being so far away from the band, those seats weren’t bad at all. The sound was just as pristine, and you didn’t have to crane your neck — or worry about an overhead balcony — to see all of the amazing visuals.
Of course, when you combine such absolute intelligibility with a live performance of decades-old songs, there’s no way to hide the inevitable discrepancies between the live performance and the carefully engineered tracks on the original record. But the four musicians on stage, including frontman Bono, guitarist the Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Bram van den Berg (sitting in for Larry Mullen Jr.), stepped up to the challenge, with a series of creative bonuses including snippets of songs from other artists, such as Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” and Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender.”
The Eyes Have It
As amazing as the venue sounded, the audio is, bottom line, a fitting complement to what was really knocking the socks off the nearly 20,000 people packing the place — the visuals. (Maybe that’s the reason the spherical 580,000 square foot LED “exosphere” on the venue’s exterior depicted a blinking human eye, and not an ear, on its surface in the months-long lead-up to opening night).
The full impact of the venue’s interior 160,000-square foot 16K x 16K LED screen was showcased early on by filling the dome with a towering silo of text that morphed and turned the round venue into a box-like space, with the square ceiling appearing ready to crush the crowd as it descended.
The visuals also reached an early crescendo as Bono sang “Even Better Than the Real Thing” with artist Marco Brambilla’s King Size, a maximalist, AI-enhanced homage to Las Vegas and Elvis Presley that was specially commissioned for these shows. (At one point it’s all anchored by a monumental image generated by an AI query to cross Elvis Presley with the Statue of Liberty.)
Other striking images included a Sphere-filling flurry of sparks (during “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?) and poles waving “flags” of bright flame at night and white steam by day. At one point, the venue transformed into a giant UV bug-zapper filled with black light, with the blurred outline of insects approaching, landing and appearing to stick to the “outside” of the inner screen, gradually turning the venue from electric blue to black.
Breaks in the Action
Whether it was by design or just from a lack of available visual content, the audience’s eyeballs got a break from dynamic visual overload as the screens went dark and the band performed with nothing more than shadows from the four lamppost-like lighting structures cast on the inner screen’s dark and unlit surface.
These four structures, each topped with moving lights, were fully automated, and for other songs they morphed in synch with automated video gear to fill the screen with I-Mag as the band performed hits off Achtung Baby including “Mysterious Ways.”
Then, for the first part of their encore medley, the band sang “Elevation,” along with their new song about Las Vegas, “Atomic City,” and then “Vertigo.” As they were wrapping up with three more hits — “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “With or Without You” and “Beautiful Day,” the show visuals reached their climax. Accompanying these songs, the audience watched the band perform as if their stage was set up in the parking lot outside, amid a current-day Las Vegas cityscape, as if the Sphere’s walls and surfaces had disappeared.
Gradually, some big industrial cranes appeared, steadily removing every building in sight — like a construction time-lapse video, but in reverse. At one moment, the Ferris Wheel-like High Roller was there, lit and moving. But then it stopped and got dismantled, reduced to a diminished section of arcs before disappearing altogether.
Eventually, more and more chunks of the neon-lit metropolis disappeared. In place of paved streets, there was just sand and creosote bushes, with a few lights and mountains in the distance. Finally, those modest settlements vanished as well, and water started flooding the desert valley. A dark sphere emerged on the rising sea, drifting closer and closer to the band performing on stage, rotating as a light-colored portal appeared within view.
The dark sphere’s pale orifice expanded as it approached, eliciting a gasp from the crowd as it appeared to swallow the entire venue, filling the vast space with Es Devlin’s Nevada Ark, a depiction of more than 250 species of endangered Nevada wildlife reflecting on a shimmering watery surface.
Postcard from Earth
On Oct. 6, Sphere at the Venetian premiered Darren Aronofsky’s newest film, Postcard from Earth, a post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi film produced specifically for the venue that will alternate with U2’s show dates.
Along with a futurist story line that brings a space-traveling Adam and Eve back to a restored earthly Eden, many years after humans had despoiled the place and departed, the production shows off a full array of Sphere’s immersive sensory experiences. These include wind and humidity effects, scents, and haptic seat rumbles that dovetail with the venue’s powerful subwoofers and impressive moving sonic effects.
While U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere only scratched the surface of Sphere’s true sonic potential, the band’s music and imagery still provided 20,000 show-goers with a hugely memorable and satisfying experience. The Sphere is here, and a potentially impressive run of amazing concert experiences seems like it’s just getting started.
