Richard Patrick and company tried their hardest last night to rock the doors off the small Cafe Du Nord on Market Street in San Francisco. Patrick's reincarnation of his original band, Filter, came together after a 5 year hiatus while he joined the ex-Stone Temple Pilot DeLeo Brothers on their recent "Army of Anyone" project.
Patrick last visited SF with Army of Anyone just over a year ago when they played Slim's -- you can read my review and check out a video of "Take a Picture" here!
The Cafe Du Nord show was one of 3, very intimate west-coast club shows that Patrick was using as a warm-up before heading out on the summer festival circuit starting in a few weeks.
A local band, Cold Hot Crash, opened the night with a short 25 minute set that concluded with a classic by the punk-metal band, Helmet -- their anthem, "Unsung" -- which was a nice finishing touch to a band that reminded me most of the Foo Fighters.
After a brief 30-minute set-change, Patrick followed his bandmates onstage and kicked into high gear with a pounding rendition of "Welcome to the Fold". Considering Filter's new album, "Anthems for the Damned" is due out in May, I was expecting Patrick to play a higher percentage of new/unreleased material from the forthcoming album, but he stuck to the classics last night and only played 2 new songs; one of which can be found on their MySpace page here (at the time of this writing).
I found a copy of the San Diego setlist and from what I remember, it looks very similar to the one from last night with the notes that I've included below:
- Intro
- Welcome to the Fold
- American Cliche
- The Take (San Diego)
- Where Do We Go From Here
- Trip Like I Do
- It's Gonna Kill Me
- The Wake (San Diego)
- Jurassitol
- Kill the Day (San Diego)
- Captain Bligh
- Soldiers of Misfortune (New)
- Hey Man, Nice Shot
- (There was supposed to be the encore here)
- Cold (skipped)
- Take a Picture
Here's a nice video of their performance of their version of The Crystal Method's 'Trip Like I Do' that Filter/Richard Patrick remixed for the Spawn movie soundtrack. Here's "(Can't You) Trip Like I Do":
As you can tell from the pictures and video I shot, I was close enough to the stage to see the setlist throughout the show and noticed that 2 songs near the middle of the set were already blacked-out as the show began. I also noticed that a 3rd song was skipped that should have been part of the encore. These could have been new tracks from the new album, but I don't know for sure.
Unfortunately, there's no easy way on or off the stage at the Cafe Du Nord, so at the end of what was meant to be the 'first set', Patrick found himself and the band almost trapped on-stage -- or at least felt that it would have been too much of a hassle to jump off-stage and wade through the crowd to reach the side door, and then wade back through the crowd to get back onstage for a formal encore. So, instead of a 2-song encore, the band closed out the night with "Take a Picture".
Before breaking out into "Take a Picture", Richard explained that while he shopped the single around to potential record labels, the labels didn't understand the drastic departure from the previous harder/industrial Filter album -- and were too risk adverse to sign the band and the new album to a deal. In their minds, they wanted more of the same "Hey Man, Nice Shot" -- not all that different from the mentality of the labels today... resisting change and fighting their customers.
Here's the video for "Hey Man, Nice Shot":
Followed by the video for "Take a Picture":
