After a busy two weeks of music festivals and headline shows, J-pop sensation YOASOBI graced Oakland Arena for the penultimate stop of their Never Ending Stories North America tour. With a set list packed with songs from their latest album The Book for, as well as fan favorites from their extensive discography, the duo came ready to ignite the overcast Friday evening with their electric star power.
Even before the concert started, the venue swarmed with fans as they went about their pre-show duties. A number of photo-ops were set up around the circular hallway, beckoning fans to snap a memory of YOASOBI’s arrival. The merch lines curved around a considerable length of the space, but they moved surprisingly quick, with the streamlined process getting hundreds of people through during the 90 minutes before the concert. There was a noticeable absence of physical CDs and vinyls at the stand, which seemed like a missed opportunity, but the available merch selection made up for it, including an Oakland-exclusive tour shirt, graphic tees, a bandana, and a character keychain, among other items.
As the clock ticked ten minutes past 8 PM, the lights slowly dimmed in the arena; the night was about to rise. Ayase and ikura strutted onto the dark stage, greeting the sold-out Oakland crowd with a deep bow, before exploding in both sonic and visual color with their beloved hit “IDOL.” With the energy coursing through the stands, the duo and their band kept up the momentum with two of their buzzy, driving rock numbers, “The Blessing” and “UNDEAD.” The audio mixing felt slightly unbalanced during these songs, hitting the arena sidelines with a wall of indistinguishable sound and muting some of their impact, but this problem steadily resolved itself as the concert went on.
The duo then took a pause to formally welcome their fans in both English and Japanese, conversing briefly with the Japanese-speaking members of the crowd and teaching the rest of the attendees some Japanese phrases in a call-and-response format. The last of these phrases was mou ikkai (“one more time”); the lesson then segued into the unrelenting electronic pulse of their PlayStation collaboration song “PLAYERS,” where the crowd echoed this newly-learned vocabulary during the chorus.
YOASOBI knows how to construct a story, and the structure of their concert gave as much evidence to this as their music. Following “PLAYERS” was another two tracks tied to anime properties; then, ikura introduced the “love song” portion of the set, her vocal clarity transitioning into a more melancholic timbre as the songs mellowed out from their energetic electropop heights. Throughout all these acts, different visualizers gamboled across the screens, showcasing the various short stories their songs adapted through a diverse array of art styles. Even the set design made references to their “never-ending stories” theme, from the “stack of novels” Ayase performed on top of to the side screens that acted as the “spines” of the book-like center screens.
Most striking was the storytelling within their lighting work. From the fluorescent parallel beams that extended to the opposite end of the arena at the beginning of the show to the fuzzy yellow haze during the Pokémon tribute “Biri-Biri,” the variety of lighting displays made it so that the visual novelty never wore off. The best lighting execution was during “Tabun,” when the faint vertical bars of yellow light trapped the performers on the mainstage. It went along well with the song’s lyrical lament, visually emulating the pain of feeling stuck with yourself after breaking up with the person you loved.
Second to this display was the constellation of lasers that shot out of the stage during “Orion,” the duo’s newest single. The web of light wove itself around the arena before evaporating, the venue shrouded in a dim blue. The only shining light left was on ikura, singing her heart out on the runway. With the way the white light glowed around the bottom edges of her flared top piece, and with her crystal clear voice reverberating through the space, she truly looked like an angel.
Something so special about this Never Ending Stories stop was just how integral everything, and everyone, felt to its procession. Throughout the entire concert, members of the audience were featured onscreen as part of the event’s visuals, the camera swapping between various concertgoers shaking their banners and posing in their Frieren and Ai Hoshino cosplays. The accompanying band members each got their special spotlight during “Ano Yume o Nazotte,” and while their solos were unfortunately muddied by the venue’s unrefined acoustics, it was still a delight to witness them go all out on their instruments. During one of their brief breaks, ikura gave a heartfelt shoutout to all the Japanese and American staff that made the tour possible, a sentiment that prompted the longest round of applause of the entire night. This kind of message usually gets saved for the very end of a concert in a quick statement, so its placement in the middle of their set made their gratitude resonate even more in people’s hearts.
Additionally unexpected was the use of live translation technology as a tool of communication during the concert. After the bold, hypnotic performance of the Frieren opening theme “Yusha,” the band took a rest as Ayase addressed the crowd with his thoughts on the tour. A black tab popped up on the main screen then, as a live English auto-translation of Ayase’s words typed itself out. While the machine obviously had its limitations, lacking the situational context an interpreter would possess — its literal translation of “Do you like YOASOBI?” into “Do you like nighttime activities?” was particularly amusing — it was an interesting new way to connect YOASOBI to their international fans and further incorporate the written element of the “novels into music” mantra that is core to their creative process.
The concert came to its hypothetical close with the uplifting chords of their sports anthem “Butai ni Tatte,” for which ikura slipped on her own guitar and rocked out with the band, and “Gunjo,” whose choral outro was paired with a showering of confetti over every seat on the floor. As YOASOBI left the stage, the call-and-response exercise from earlier had its own reprise, the arena shaking with cries for an encore: Mou ikkai! Mou ikkai! Soon the duo acceded, reappearing in custom-embroidered San Francisco Giants jerseys that they showed off to the ecstatic crowd.
The first encore song “Adrena” fittingly sent an adrenaline rush through the room, pushing everyone out of their seats as the performers encouraged them to jump along. As Ayase and ikura walked to the very end of the runway and stood face to face with their fans, they dove into their final song, ending where it all began with their debut track “Yoru ni Kakeru.” It was the perfect full-circle moment to close out the show, a performance both wistful and euphoric, and most of all symbolic of YOASOBI themselves. Though the nighttime activities in Oakland drew to a close, the duo’s journey was only just beginning.
