But to be fair - these are pretty much the only real "highlights" of 2017 and, while the band and Jon definitely have shown some improvement and he at least has a bit of showmanship back, even these performances maybe are at level with some mid-2013 performances and still far away from what was delivered up until 2011.
I'm all for them to fight their way back, but danfan said that he had seen about 50 shows of this band and the most recent one was the worst. Even if I had chosen to see the ones in Rio or Sao Paulo I would have come to the same conclusion. They still weren't a match to what I had seen in Germany in 2013 where they already had Phil X on board.

The Sao Paulo show wasn't so much about his vocals being great for me, let's face it, they are still pretty (and sometimes very) rough. I was looking forward to watching the Rock In Rio show after reading peoples comments but I found it for most parts awful vocally.

What brought some belief in this band back to me after seeing the Sao Paulo was Jon acting like a rock star again for some moments during the show. Not only the obvious acts like the Saturday Night ad-lib, the These Days outro or the Bed of Roses. For me it felt unbelievable to see Jon work the stage on songs like Bad Name, Born To Be My Baby, It's My Life, Have a Nice Day, Prayer etc. Songs we couldn't have dreamt of Jon leaving his mic stand on a few months back. On some vidoes where the audience drowns Jons voice it relly felt for brief moments like putting the clock back five years or so.

Let's face it, the North American part of the tour was truly awful, let's not let the relative improvement in South America change that.

Unfortunately it always seems to be the way that the NA Arena leg gets horrible static vanilla setlists. Combine that with Jon struggling vocally and barely moving and it's worse than anything. If I was a fan in the US I wouldn't call the tour a triumph by any means.

However, as a fan in Europe, and used to the stadium shows and setlists that we get, I'm heartened by the improvement shown in the last couple of shows and hope that extends going forward. The vocals might be shot, but they are getting to a slightly more acceptable level and the band are sounding good. Rock In Rio is a show I'm actually happy to watch again, rather than the earlier shows watching with some grim determination to see how bad it is.