Review: U2’s 360 Tour goes all the way around

So it turns out it is possible to see a good performance in Scott Stadium this fall.
Thursday night’s nearly-full moon rose over a crowd north of 50,000 positively a-twinkle with camera flashes. Muse and U2, with their triple liquid-U name pairing, took the stage under what looked like nothing so much as a massive, multimillion dollar alien fungus, not least of all when glowing with blacklight and exuding smoke like clouds of spores.

“What do you think of our space junk?” Bono joked.
The set, known as “the Claw,” was indicative of two bands that excel at what they do, but do so with a heightened sense of the bizarre. In U2, that results in high, arching guitar engines with the treble turned all the way up. In Muse, it’s aggressive leg-stompers that always sound like they take place at the end of the world. In what was easily Charlottesville’s be-there-or-be-square concert of the year, both were in abundance.
When your finest album came out well over two decades ago, it’s hard not to say a band has seen better days, but U2 is still out there kicking and screaming and rocking away. Does lead singer Bono bring politics into it a little too much? Why yes he does. But in between the preachy stuff he puts on a grade-A show.

The boys from Dublin started their set with a bunch of picks off of their new album, “No Line on the Horizon,” and indeed it might be said that recent rather than old was favored ever so slightly too much. Versions of the title track and “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” were splendid, but not as haunting as the Edge’s guitar line for, say, “New Years Day” or “Where the Streets Have No Name.”
Their faces on a huge, circular composite screen projection worthy of the name 360 Tour, U2 had fun flexing a little: the Edge would sing lead or drummer Larry Mullen Jr. would rip into a bongo. The glowing production values were only occasionally over-the-top, such as when Bono came out in a suit emitting bright red lasers like some kind of intergalactic skewer.
That crazy old Irish-man sings about defend-ing his “right to be ridiculous.” Noted.

Overall the band’s energy was just plain great, and even if they did have the nerve to act like they weren’t going to play a couple of classics like “With or Without You,” around the second encore they finally got around to it.

There is absolutely no way to say enough about Muse, the best opening act in rock ’n’ roll right now. On most songs just a delightfully loud trio, these guys claim new fans every time they play. Their sound is a healthy mix of Queen and angry 80s metal, with a hearty aftertaste of Radiohead. The really good Radio-head.

“No one’s gonna take me alive,” singer/lead guitarist Matthew Bellamy belts, and indeed he sounds like his life depends on it. “Time has come to make things right.” Opening with an album closer, the epic “Knights of Cydonia,” was a strong choice.
On some songs even more face-shredding than U2, Muse gives a good name to fist-in-the-air fury rock disguised as a glam party — mostly by cornering the market. And the beat and pulse of songs like “Starlight” are downright sexy.

If U2 is just past their prime, then Muse can still look forward to theirs. The 360 Tour, however, hits them at very rich times in their careers. The song cata-logues are long and get-ting longer, performance traits have been developed and worn in and the stage does a lot of the talking.
“I feel like I have more to learn,” Bono said. “And I’m going to learn it with these three men.”